Dominion
by Aurelia le
Summary: For the Fire Nation royal siblings, love has always warred with hate. But neither the outward accomplishment of peace nor Azula's defeat have brought the respite Zuko expected. Will his sister's plans answer this, or only destroy them both? This chapter: An injured Zuko and Gaang make their way to the North Pole. Tensions erupt, plans are laid and promises broken. Healing begins.
1. Hell

_Have you found her?_

The Fire Lord stood at the edges of the well-dressed crowd, beside one of many identical gold-plated pillars that lined the torchlit hall, and wished he could disappear. A blue-tinted ice sculpture was positioned atop a short pedestal to his left, perspiring almost as much as Zuko was in his heavy mantle and crimson robes of state. The topknot that bound up half of his long black hair provided only marginal relief, and his flame headpiece had long since begun to sag as it slowly came undone.

The deep and brassy strains of a traditional Fire Nation ballad floated through the smoky air, accompanied by the quiet murmur of polite conversation among the guests … and the distinctive rise and fall of Sokka's voice as he delivered the punchline of a joke. Having sated his appetite for meat courtesy of the many tray-bearing servers roaming the hall, he was apparently launching into sarcasm. Though the upper crust of Zuko's country did not seem to appreciate his humor, he could hear the now-teenaged Toph bark with laughter at the conclusion of Sokka's joke.

Fire Lady Mai was positioned near them along the opposite wall, her raven hair styled in the bun she almost always wore now, to accommodate the same flame headpiece that Zuko's mother bore perpetually in his memories. It looked very different on her, perhaps because of the heavy bangs she still retained and the elegant strands of hair that fell freely on either side of her bun to drape over her angular shoulders. Her back was ramrod straight as she stood listening to the enthusiastic waxings of an Earth Kingdom diplomat, her long, pale face looking neither more nor less bored than was her wont. Her hooded eyes and impassive expression betrayed nothing of what she felt, if in fact she felt anything at all. Two years of marriage were not always sufficient for Zuko to tell.

_Have you found her?_

But even the comfort of old friends was not enough to ease the weight that had settled in Zuko's stomach, and the Fire Lord thought he might spontaneously combust if he had to spend one more second in the flickering light and quiet buzz of this too familiar hall. When he heard the appreciative _oohs_ and _ahhs_ of the latest spectators to Aang's umpteenth demonstration of his air scooter, Zuko took the opportunity to duck behind a sliding panel and out into the cool night air of the veranda.

The stars shone brightly in the inky sky, clear save for a few wispy indigo clouds. The moon cast the packed dirt of the long courtyard that lay before him into soft relief, very different from the deep shadows that clung to its edges in the dim crimson light of Sozin's Comet. It had been four years and several hours ago that Zuko arrived here uninvited at his sister's lonely coronation, and she challenged him to an Agni Kai. He stood not far from where she'd knelt then at the head of the steps, waiting for the Fire Sages to crown her.

He wondered if Azula knew what day it was. Did she mark it like he did? The day of his triumph and ascent to power had been the day of her defeat and descent into insanity. Of course, the latter had been a long time coming. He saw that now. That was only the day her carefully constructed mask had acquired its last fatal crack, and shattered. He wondered who she was without it.

_Have you found her?_

Zuko had visited his sister exactly once since she was committed to the asylum on Ember Island. Once was enough. Once was more than he thought he could bear again. She was not herself.

The same image that had been indelibly burned into his memory flashed across his mind at the recollection: Azula kneeling slumped over at the back of her bare, white-padded cell, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. It was perhaps an odd impression, considering she had been chained hand and foot, her wrists bound behind her for his visit. But these chains were more visible than the ones she knew before, and they bothered Zuko for reasons he couldn't articulate.

He had not worn the robes and mantle and the five-point crown of the Fire Lord as when he visited his father, opting instead for a casual tunic. He did not want to provoke her unnecessarily. He entered to find her clad in a simple short-sleeved shirt and pants, both a vibrant shade of Fire Nation red. She had barely lifted her head when he stepped through the reinforced metal door that closed behind him, otherwise evincing no reaction. Her empty brown-gold eyes looked out at him, framed by uneven bangs, and suddenly what he'd meant to say fled from his mind. And so Azula was the first to speak.

"Are you real?" she asked at length, her tone flat and affectless.

Zuko managed a simple "Yes," but no more. He would not have known even to volunteer this if he hadn't questioned the banished servants, now restored to their stations, about her deteriorating mental state in the days preceding her coronation.

She seemed to pause thoughtfully at his reply, an indefinable something stirring behind her vacant gaze. "Is this … the first time you've visited me?"

"I meant to come sooner, but —" Zuko started to apologize, then stopped as the implication sank in. Oh no. No. She was hallucinating him too.

His awful realization did not seem to register with Azula, who carefully drew her shackled feet out from under her to sit with her knees drawn up to her chest, leaning against the padded wall. "How are you?" he asked, after the silence stretched too long for comfort. It was a stupid question. He wanted her to look at him like it was a stupid question, and call him a dumdum for asking it.

Instead, her lips quirked into a bitter smile, and Zuko tensed reflexively. "Mother comes to see me," she replied, leaning slightly toward him, with the air of one confiding a secret. He felt his breath catch in his throat, and stood very still as she continued. "She tells me," Azula gave the barest of pauses, "that she loves me. Can you believe it?"

No, he couldn't. Azula seemed to gather this from his expression. Her smile spread until it looked like it would break, and her face along with it. It was horribly reminiscent of the way she'd screamed when Katara had chained her to the grate. "Neither can I," she confirmed, with a sort of grim satisfaction. "I tell her so every time, but she never listens. I might as well be talking to myself."

Zuko flinched at her unthinking allusion. Oh Agni, this was not his sister. He wished she would curse him, or lie to him, or put him down, or dig her sharp nails into his skin. It would have been better than this. It was what he knew. She was what he knew.

At his reaction, her expression acquired a depth that hadn't been there before. She looked at him as she had stared into the fire that night on Ember Island, as if suddenly the walls had come down to reveal years of accumulated hurt. "Have you found her?" Azula asked, as quietly as she had made her revelation then. _My own mother, thought I was a monster_.

Her brother stared. It was almost as if she had guessed the reason for his visit. Azula looked away from him, apparently ashamed of having even asked. "I thought you would look for her, now that Father —"

"No," Zuko said darkly, clenching his fists at the memory of his fruitless conversations with the deposed Ozai, "he won't tell me where she is."

"I suspect he doesn't know," Azula reasoned, her head still turned slightly to the side. "He would have made it a point not to know, to distance himself from her as much as possible. She was a traitor, and if her role in his ascent to power were ever discovered…"

"She was our _mother_," Zuko reproached her. Even knowing what Ursa had probably done or caused to happen that night, especially knowing she had acted for his protection, he felt the need to defend her.

"More of a mother to _you_ than to _me_," his sister quietly replied, closing her eyes. Her nostrils flared slightly in anger as she took a deep breath, her jaw set in a hard line.

Zuko sighed. It seemed she was determined to remain utterly unreasonable when it came to the subject of their mother. "Did you ever ask Father where she went?" he tried instead. "Azula?" he prompted, when she did not reply.

"Once," she admitted harshly, sounding disgusted with herself. She continued to refuse to look at him, did not even open her eyes.

"And?" Zuko pressed, taking a step toward Azula.

She finally glared sidelong at him. "And I knew after that never to ask again." Zuko felt his hopes of ever learning his mother's whereabouts falter. If Father wouldn't even tell _her_…

He came to a decision. "Did she … say anything to you, the night she left?" Zuko asked hesitantly. This was a mistake.

Azula's eyes flashed, and she looked quickly up at him. "No, _Zuzu_," she snapped, her voice wavering, "I suppose she only had time for her _favorite_ before she abandoned us **both**."

Zuko blinked once in surprise. Azula was breathing hard, clearly fighting a losing battle to hold back the tears that threatened to spill from her swimming eyes. "She never said goodbye to you?" he whispered.

And instantly regretted it.

Her teeth clenched in anguish, Azula squeezed her eyes shut and seemed to fold in on herself, as if to hide her tear-streaked face behind her knees. But with her arms bound behind her back and her knees drawn so closely to her chest, she could not keep her balance, and toppled over in the attempt.

Zuko instinctively rushed to her side. He was bent over her, arms outstretched to help her up, before she screeched, "_Get away from me!_" A strange, dark green tinge stained her tongue, visible only now that she screamed. He withdrew quickly when she kicked out with her shackled feet, singeing his boots with the edge of an arc of blue flame she carved through the air.

Three of the heavily armored guards standing outside burst through the door at her cry, stun pikes leveled at her. But Zuko halted them with the sharply raised hand that was becoming an increasingly automatic gesture to him as Fire Lord, his eyes riveted on his sister as she climbed to her knees, her trembling shoulders bent, her lank brown hair falling over her face. "I didn't know," he said, fighting to steady his voice as he lowered his hand. "Azula, I'm sorry —"

"_Liar!_" she shrieked, snapping erect as if stung, her arms twisting in their bonds. "You _never_ loved me!"

Zuko stared for a moment, taken aback, until he realized. She wasn't speaking to him. He followed her line of sight to the empty space to the right of him where she'd hurled her accusation. And he had thought this couldn't get any worse.

"I snuck into his room and stole his knife, I _saw you_ say goodbye to him!" Azula tearfully accused thin air, seemingly oblivious to his continued presence, or that of the guards. "I ran back to my room and sat on my bed and _waited_ for you! And you never opened the door! You never opened the door…" she said, in a voice that seemed too small for her. Her shoulders slumped in a defeated way so unlike her that Zuko was visited with the irrational urge to shake her bodily until she snapped out of it.

He could practically feel the guards staring by this point, and turned his head to see the leftmost one nudge the guard in the middle with his elbow, who then shrugged nonchalantly in response, apparently accustomed to the princess's hallucinations. The remaining guard fingered his stun pike idly, looking bored. Zuko felt rage coil in his stomach, rage such as he had not felt since he chased the Avatar. "Get out," he said poisonously.

The guards stood immediately at attention, evidently surprised. "But, sire —" the middle one began, his voice muffled through the skull facemask they all wore.

"That's an order," Zuko cut him off coldly, glaring daggers at the guards until they withdrew from her cell to the antechamber. He vaguely heard the guard who'd contradicted him order one of those in the outside hall to send for the doctor, before the last guard out of the room closed the door behind him. They would not have much time.

Azula was laughing now. It was not the high, false peal she'd affected at Chan's party, nor even the sweet, bell-like sound he barely remembered from their distant childhood, but the unhinged cackling of a broken mind that he had not heard since their Agni Kai, and hoped never to hear again.

She was still addressing what he could only guess to be the illusion of their mother, though she seemed to have recalled Zuko's presence at last. "He can't _hear_ you, he can't _see_ you!" Azula crowed in a singsong voice. "You only exist for _me_ now, you miserable bitch!" she taunted bitterly, her voice ragged. "If there's a hell, you must be in it! If there's a hell, you must be in it!"

Zuko blinked back tears as he approached her, his hands shook until he clenched them into fists. He finally could not decide if Azula was speaking to their mother or herself. He couldn't listen to this anymore. "Azula!" he said sharply, descending to his knees to be more nearly on her level and seizing her tear-streaked face roughly in his hands.

She froze instantly at his touch and harsh tone, and looked strangely at Zuko — as if she recognized him, but not as himself. He had not held her like this since they were children. He had not been this close to her since the night he confronted her about lying to their father. He felt his mouth go dry and his heart beat faster. "You have to stop this," he said hoarsely, wondering distantly where he had found the presence of mind even to speak. "It isn't real. There's no one there."

And suddenly she was back, looking on him with the old familiar condescension. And in the silky tone he knew so well, Azula said, "There never is."

A single tear drew a track down his cheek, and Zuko released her almost involuntarily at this. How could her words still cut him so deeply, even now? How did she always know just what to say, to make him feel — to make him feel —

The door burst open as a gold-clad doctor hastily entered the cell, backed by two orderlies. "Your Majes—" he began urgently, but faltered when he saw the Fire Lord kneeling opposite the disgraced princess, his fingertips just brushing the line of her jaw. Zuko quickly dropped his hands, and climbed to his feet beside her, while Azula looked away. Conscious of herself and her surroundings again, he guessed she did not want to let them see her tears. It had always been so with his sister.

"You shouldn't get too close, sire!" the balding doctor warned, recovering from his surprise. "She's breathed fire at several of the guards who've tried to subdue her."

Zuko didn't move an inch from his place beside Azula, but frowned. "She can still breathe fire?" He had thought that only a result of Sozin's Comet.

"Yes, she _can_," Azula said tartly, still kneeling bound at his feet and clearly irritated at being referred to as if she were not even present. Zuko didn't reply, staring expectantly at the doctor.

"We usually keep her muzzled, except at mealtimes," he added, with a nervous glance at the fuming princess, "but as you wanted to speak to her…"

Zuko's frown deepened to a scowl. Muzzled, like an animal? But if she was threatening her caretakers… He sighed, rubbing his forehead briefly with his hand. The doctor, seeing an opening, volunteered, "Visiting hours have ended, my Lord. Perhaps it would be better if you concluded your interview —"

"This ends when I say it ends," Zuko reproved him. "I am the Fire Lord." He felt rather than saw Azula smile to herself. It was that familiar smile that said, _You're not doing it right_. He just knew that it was.

"But she's due for her medication —"

"Subjects questioning you already, Zuzu?" Azula cut across the doctor, arching a sly brow. "Maybe you shouldn't have left my crown at home." So, she did remember.

"I didn't want to upset you," he said, refraining with some difficulty from reminding her it was _his_ crown now, and would remain so. He resented that she did not appreciate his small kindness, but supposed he should have expected no better from Azula.

"How _good_ of you, o merciful Lord!" she bristled, glaring defiantly up at Zuko. Her tone stripped the acknowledgment of any satisfaction it might have held for him. "You can well afford to be kind, having won at my expense," Azula accused him, "but at least have the decency not to _pretend_ this isn't what you've always wanted!"

His eyes widened, and he took a step back to better look her in the face. Azula, appealing to his sense of decency? It was almost as shocking as the thought that he would wish his own sister insane. "That isn't — I don't —"

"Why do you think I always laughed when you fell?" she demanded, hardly seeming to hear him. "I was better than you at _everything_, and everyone who mattered loved you **more!**" She bowed her head so that her loose hair obscured her face, and he almost thought he heard her whisper, "And me, not at all."

_Not Father_, Zuko thought, and the pang that used to accompany that realization was gone. Seeing what their father's love, if it could even be called that, had done to Azula reminded him how much better off he was without it. He only wished that she could see it too.

Zuko almost voiced this aloud, except that he was uncomfortably aware of the doctor behind them speedily taking notes on a pad he had produced seemingly from nowhere. This was probably more than they'd gotten out of Azula in the entire time she'd stayed here. He knew she was as talented at concealment as she was at misdirection.

Azula brought an end to his musing when she slowly raised her head, her dark hair falling away from her heart-shaped face, and added, "You couldn't do anything right, and I could, and you hated me for it." She spoke so matter-of-factly, without the slightest hint of malice, that he was almost inclined to agree with her. "I think you hate me still."

_I never hated you_, Zuko thought. But he couldn't say it. Not to her. He could only stare down into her clear amber eyes and feel like he was seeing inside her for the first time. "How ironic," she concluded, holding his gaze with a quiet deliberance, "that each of us should have what the other wanted most. Together, we could almost be a whole person."

_The only way we win, is together_. Her voice held the same rare admission of need that it had in the catacombs of Ba Sing Se, and Zuko drew a sharp breath. He would never tell her so, but his mind had been made up to join her when he saw her cornered by Aang and Katara. Her arms extended at her sides, her face taut with apprehension, her eyes darting from one opponent to the other, had caused his thoughts to crystallize in that moment.

He would protect her.

Of course, whether he admitted it or not, she probably knew this, perhaps even counted on it. Azula always knew, just as surely as Azula always lied. He would not fall for her manipulations again. "That's not true," he countered, his expression hardening with resolve. "I'm not like you, Azula. I chose right."

She was silent for a long moment, and he had to make a conscious effort not to flinch from her unblinking stare. Finally, her eyes narrowed, a move that made her resemblance to their father even more pronounced. "And how exactly," she demanded, her voice grown quiet with menace, "did you _choose right?_ Chose the right time to turn traitor? The right ragtag band of peasants to ally yourself with? Congratulations, dumdum, on screwing up so fortuitously."

The heavily muscled orderlies exchanged an uneasy glance, perhaps wondering if their new Fire Lord would take offense. Her words might have stung once, back when she could hide the hurt behind them. But even as she tore into him, her eyes said it. _You abandoned me, abandoned our country. You betrayed Father, fought against us. Your family_. Zuko had not expected her to understand, but he hoped one day she would. That was why she was here, he told himself.

But even as he held her fierce gaze, it grew more distant. "I served my father and my country," she said, in a tone that was equal parts bitterness and resignation, "and this is my reward." A flameproof padded cell. Metal restraints. Armored guards and drugs in her food. Azula somehow managed to indicate all this with a disparaging flick of her eyes from one corner of the room to another.

Zuko couldn't let her think like that. This was not meant to be an end for her, but a beginning. Sensing the import of this moment, he settled into a crouch across from her, sitting on his heels until they were at eye level, and rested his forearms on his knees. "This isn't a punishment, Azula," he insisted firmly. "You're here to get better."

The same twisted smile she'd greeted him with on the day of their Agni Kai spread across her face, and Zuko felt his heart sink. "Why don't you just give me a lobotomy, dear brother?" Azula offered, her words as sharp and polished as a knife-edge. Zuko blinked. "Cut out the part of me that offends you so, and save us all a lot of time and trouble?

"I could be the meek little princess you and Mother always wanted, and everyone would be happy, except for Father, because nothing makes him happy, and except for me, because I would be _gone_." And her voice, grown rawer with every word, fell disturbingly flat on the last one. "Just think of it," Azula whispered, and her darker eyes held his golden ones transfixed, "a world where you wouldn't always be _less_."

His mind had ground to such a halt that he did not even notice the insult. Zuko could only crouch frozen across from her, in something closely approaching horror. He finally managed a shaky reply. "You — you can't want that." _I don't want that_.

Her expression didn't change, but she replied with uncharacteristic patience, as if she were explaining to a small child. "What I want doesn't matter anymore, if it ever did."

"It matters to me," Zuko said, so softly that he almost wondered if she would hear him. The suspicion that drew her arched brows and tugged at the corners of her mouth indicated she had.

"Does it?" Azula snapped. "I know why you're _really_ here. And I can tell you I don't know where she is!" Her slanted eyes looked inward on the memories that were her only world now, filling with tears that killed the fire of her resentment, leaving only ashes in their wake. "She didn't want me — to find her," Azula spoke painfully, as if she were slowly suffocating, "she didn't — want me…"

"That's not true," Zuko said, sounding desperate even to his own ears. He reached for her almost compulsively. "Azula —"

"_Don't touch me!_" she shrieked, and Zuko snatched back his hand as if burned. "You're just like _her_, just like Mai and Ty Lee! You're just like **Father!**" Azula wildly accused him, her narrow shoulders gone rigid with anger again. "Pretend you want me, pretend you care, and then throw me away! You'll never come **back!**" she said disgustedly, her mouth twisting into an ugly sneer.

"Yes, I will!" he cried indignantly, stung by the comparison to their father. What was worse, he did not think she'd said it just to hurt him. It was really what she thought.

If she noticed his offense, she gave no sign of satisfaction for once, but merely replied, "No, you won't."

"I _will_ come back —" he tried to insist.

"Liar," she flatly denied him.

"Azula —"

"Liar!" she spat.

"Azu—"

"Liarliarliarliar_liar_**liar**LIAR!" Azula drowned him out, until it was like ten of her were yelling it at him at once. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, and tears drew fresh tracks down her face. If her hands had not been bound behind her, he felt sure she would have held them over her ears. Losing his balance, Zuko fell backward onto his elbows in surprise at her outburst, just in time to avoid the gout of blue flame she loosed from her mouth when she screamed —

The orderlies were on her in an instant, tackling her to the padded floor. One grabbed her bound ankles, while the other pinned her on her stomach with a knee in her back, twisting her shackled arms behind her at a painful angle designed to immobilize her. Zuko sat up again, biting back a cry of outrage only with difficulty. The man pinning her down was as powerfully built as their father, and seeing Azula at his mercy — It didn't seem right.

"Liar — liar — liar —" she half-panted, half-gasped, barely able to draw breath enough to speak with the orderlies restraining her, thrashing against their grip in a futile effort to free herself nonetheless. Zuko wondered for a split second why she didn't use her flames against them, until he remembered. Firebending comes from the breath. If she couldn't breathe, she couldn't bend. But if she kept struggling against the orderly's hold like she was, she would probably break one or both of her arms.

Apparently coming to the same conclusion, the doctor withdrew a small white envelope from the folds of his robe (he had put away his pad and charcoal when Azula started screaming again) and opened it to remove a pinch of a ground, dark green herb. He had informed Zuko before the visit began, perhaps hoping to reassure him, that this envelope contained a crushed herb that when spread on her tongue, would sedate Azula in less than a minute.

At the same time, a guard who'd rushed inside when she breathed fire grabbed Zuko under his arms to remove him from the cell, and the fog of indecision that had gripped him while he watched her fight lifted. A single thought flashed through his mind: He couldn't let it end like this.

"You're my sister, Azula!" he cried suddenly, easily breaking the grip of the startled guard to scramble closer to her on hands and knees. She turned her head to look at him and only breathed shallowly, her wild eyes fixed on him again. And he said plaintively, "I want you back."

"You _never_ had me!" Azula screamed, glaring balefully up at him from the floor. And her voice broke until she half-sobbed, "No one would!"

Stricken by her rejection, Zuko did not resist this time when two guards each seized one of his arms to haul him from the cell. They dragged him through the reinforced metal door while he faced behind, watching Azula thrash more weakly against her captors' hold as she gave way to tears and inarticulate cries of torment. It was an almost inhuman sound, no less frightening than the last time he'd heard it.

They cleared the bare antechamber and the exterior door, and the guards deposited Zuko against the opposite wall of the hallway outside her cell, before standing straight to adjust their shoulder guards. He just saw the doctor kneel carefully beside Azula, envelope clutched firmly in hand, before the interior door closed on her lingering screams.

Zuko jumped at the sound, suddenly aware of some five guards occupying the brightly lit hall staring down at him. At any other time, it might have occurred to him that he did not look very much like a Fire Lord at that moment, sitting slumped against the white painted wall of the asylum hallway and breathing hard, the right side of his face already streaked with tears when he did not even realize he'd been crying.

"She seemed — almost normal," Zuko said helplessly, looking desperately from one identical skull-faced guard to another, unable to stop the tears that stung his uninjured eye. "I thought..."

"She gets like that sometimes," a lanky guard, not one of those Zuko had dismissed, volunteered quietly. He tilted his facemask up to reveal a lean, dark-skinned visage beneath. "You shouldn't let it fool you. She has real problems, and they won't go away that easily."

He stared, already unused to being addressed so forthrightly by his subordinates. But a distant part of his mind, the rational part, knew that this was what he needed right now, so Zuko held the guard's brown-eyed gaze like an anchor while he calmed his breathing and brought his racing heart under control as best he could.

The guard nodded respectfully to him and replaced his facemask just as the doctor emerged from Azula's cell, flanked by his orderlies. Zuko just caught a glimpse of her through the door, lying on her side and facing away from him on the padded floor, before the gold-clad doctor closed it gently behind them. The slight rise and fall of her shoulder had been the only indication that she was still alive.

Zuko was shown in short order to the balding doctor's cluttered study, refusing the offer of a hand up from the orderly who'd pinned Azula to the floor. There, he was questioned for almost half-an-hour on his recollection of their meeting, especially that part the doctor had not directly witnessed. Zuko sat limply in his overstuffed chair and answered mechanically, hardly aware of what he was saying, while the doctor took copious notes.

The same line of thought kept running through his mind over and over again. This man was supposed to be the best. One half-hour debriefing with him, and Zuko already felt worse when he had not thought that was possible. He did not even seem to realize his own Fire Lord was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. How much less could he do for someone like Azula?

She had real problems, and they would not go away that easily. It had been weeks since their Agni Kai, and she had to be sedated after just a few minutes with him. She hallucinated even in the presence of other people, something she had never done before.

Oh Agni. Oh Agni.

She had not gotten better. She would not get better.

She would be here for the rest of her life.


	2. Real Friends

**Merry Christmas, and happy reading! Special thanks to my reviewers for your valued input, to my favers and subscribers, and to Shadow Wasserson, whose lovely oneshot "Tastes of Home" helped inspire the contents of Zuko's table ... along with ridiculous amounts of time spent researching Asian cuisine both real and fictional on Wikipedia and avatarspiritnet. Because I am not very culinary. And I like to give credit where credit is due.**

**Sorry for the delay; I have been working on this chapter literally since I posted the first one, but unfortunately, much mandatory writing for my classes has interfered in the meantime. But hopefully you won't begrudge me that, as this chapter is extra long and has about seven or eight scenes in it if I've counted correctly, which I may not have this early in the morning, but oh well.**

**Enjoy. :)**

* * *

Zuko rested his hand against one of the black stone pillars that lined the veranda, and looked out on the moonlit courtyard. He reflected that the years had brought little to discredit his initial impression.

His uncle had visited Azula six times before he told Zuko that he couldn't take it anymore. The young Fire Lord's disappointment must have shown on his face, for Iroh reluctantly admitted that she sometimes mistook him for her father. "Every time I see what has happened to her," he said painfully, "it only makes me hate my brother more."

Zuko was surprised. His uncle had never admitted to hating Ozai before, though he was more than justified. But he did not protest the end of Iroh's visits. He'd gone to see her six times. It was more than Zuko could say.

And he loved his uncle too much to want to add to the guilt that carved fresh creases in his weathered face. He remembered Iroh's advice when he taught Zuko to redirect lightning. _She's crazy, and she needs to go down_. Zuko wondered if he felt some regret, now that the deed was done and her life irretrievably ruined.

_Have you found her?_

A few months after this, she began starving herself. It started gradually, so that there was at first no indication of this change in the weekly reports Zuko demanded from her team of specialists. He knew she had been growing quieter over time, and they sedated her now only when she was in desperate need of sleep, a recurring problem for her.

And then came the news that Azula was refusing all food and water. The orderlies tried taking small bites of her bland meals or sips of her water when they delivered these to her cell, to demonstrate to her that they were not poisoned. If she noticed this, it made little difference. They came back hours later to find her rations untouched and the princess still lying on the padded floor where they had left her, staring intently into the corner just right of the door. It was the same corner she always stared into now.

That night, the kitchen staff served smoked dragonfish garnished with cabbage and lemon wedges, and seasoned with pickled ginger, salted plum sauce, and chili flakes, his favorite dish. Sea urchin _sashimi_ accented with shredded _daikon_ and mint leaves, spiced _pau_ buns and deviled platypus eggs, crimson _kimchi_ and sweet moon peaches, and stuffed crabs on white rice weighed down the length of table between himself and Mai. The steaming tentacle soup had slowly cooled while Zuko stared at his food and could not take a single bite. Because the cruel, manipulative sister who had made his life hell for more years than he cared to count was starving herself. It was absurd. It was ridiculous. It was — _your fault_. The words came unbidden as they always did.

He looked up again when another pair of chopsticks pinched a particularly large piece of his dragonfish, to see that Mai had crossed to his side of the dining table and bent over his plate in the flickering candlelight. She straightened before daintily removing the morsel from her chopsticks with her teeth, and adopted a thoughtful expression while she chewed exactly the prescribed length of time before swallowing.

"It's not poisoned, if that's what you were worried about," she observed dryly, setting her free hand lightly on the table. "Though I can't speak for the tentacle soup," she added, and made what passed for a face with her. Zuko recalled orderlies acting as superfluous food tasters while Azula stared into the same corner for hours on end, and thought he might be sick.

"You seem preoccupied," Mai added flatly, when he did not so much as smile. "Is something wrong?"

"Could you have the servants send this to my study?" Zuko gestured to the food, evading her question. A slight tightening of her mouth was the only indication of her displeasure. "There's still so much to prepare for the reparations summit next week, I thought…" He trailed off awkwardly.

His fiancée considered him for a long moment, possibly raising her eyebrows. It was hard to tell with the thick bangs that obscured her forehead. "The whole spread?" she finally inquired, accustomed by now to dinners cut short by the demands of his office. The lightest hint of sarcasm colored her low voice.

"No, just a plate," Zuko replied, so that she might at least not object to his dietary habits. His dinner would be a lot more inconspicuous sitting untouched at the corner of the desk in his study than at his place at the head of the dining table.

Without another word, Mai moved to relay his request to the servants. But a sudden impulse prompted Zuko to stand, the legs of his chair scraping discordantly against the tiled floor, and capture her wrists gently in his hands. Her exit stayed, he released her arms only to wrap Mai in his own, hugging her securely.

She did not resist, but only submitted to his embrace, though he held her close enough to feel the angry tension in her shoulders. The tip of his nose just brushed her bound hair when he bent his head to whisper in her ear, "I love you, Mai."

"I remember," she flatly replied, with a subtle hint of dismissal that cut him more keenly than any of her hidden knives ever could. "What I _don't_ know, is how long you expect that to be enough."

Disappointed, Zuko let her go. Mai did not even look at him, only walked away with the measured pace that gave no indication of their disagreement, standing as straight as if she walked with a book balanced atop her head. He thought he knew her well enough by now to guess what she meant.

His duties as Fire Lord often interfered with the private time he tried to set aside for her, and Mai was increasingly left to her own devices. She had been complaining of boredom often enough lately that Zuko began to think it might actually be loneliness that plagued her. It was times like these he wished she had a friend in the palace. But Ty Lee was off training with the Kyoshi Warriors, and Azula —

He did not speak to Mai of Azula.

Mai had told him a few days into their engagement, gently but firmly, that this was not a subject she wished to discuss any further. She would not waste her concern on someone who had used Mai and everyone around her, and expected loyalty in return. She would not spare another thought for someone who hadn't thought twice about imprisoning her for disobeying orders and saving his life.

The bored monotone in which she explained this belied her hard words, though her narrow eyes fairly burned. Zuko knew by then what to pay attention to, and that in fact, she meant it. He did his best to respect her wishes concerning Azula. Mai was not her friend anymore. He tried not to think that maybe she never had been.

But Zuko continued to receive updates on his sister, and sometimes they visibly upset him. And Mai, loving him, wanted to know what was wrong… He could not remember when he had stopped telling her and started begging other excuses. But he knew that she knew, and resented his preoccupation with Azula's condition no less for not having to hear about it.

If he was honest with himself, it was for his own sake that he didn't tell her. Zuko tripped through too many diplomatic minefields on a weekly basis to want to repeat the experience in his leisure time. Even so, this silence was unfortunate. He had no one else to discuss Azula with that wasn't hundreds of miles away or only visited once every few months —

Well, he thought grimly, that was about to change. Seating himself before the cluttered expanse of blood-colored wood that had been his father's own imposing desk, he pushed aside the many official scrolls of varying length and size that littered it. Zuko pulled fresh sheets of paper to him, smoothing them with stone paperweights drawn to their edges. Resting his elbows on the desk, he held his head in his hands for a moment, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath to gather his thoughts. Then he reached for his broad-tipped brush and swabbed it with ink, and began to compose the first of three letters…

_Have you found her?_

Walking fast, the Fire Lord emerged from the shade of an open portico and into the sunlit garden, only to be engulfed in an onrushing blur of pink.

"Zuko!" Ty Lee squealed, greeting him with a bone-crushing hug beside the budding ash tree.

"Ty Lee," he replied with a slight smile, gently prying her arms from around his neck. "It's good to see you."

She stepped back to take in his appearance, and exclaimed, "You look so regal in your Fire Lord clothes! Do you wear those all the time now?"

"Well —

"I thought I'd just wear my old outfit if I'm going to see Azula you know I don't want her to get upset 'cause I'm dressed like a Kyoshi you don't think she's still angry do you I mean it's been almost a year you don't think she's still angry?"

Zuko blinked when she finally paused for breath, taken aback at how quickly she had gone from chatting animatedly to wringing her hands. "You did read the _whole_ letter, didn't you?" he asked her slowly. It would be just like Ty Lee to hop aboard the nearest ship without even finishing when she read she could visit an old friend. "You do know she hasn't been eating, and won't speak to anyone? She may not speak to you."

To his surprise, Ty Lee nodded resolutely, though her chin trembled. "I know, I feel so bad," she said with uncharacteristic quiet. Ty Lee hugged herself around the middle and glanced down for a moment, before raising her gray eyes hopefully. "But she can still listen, right? I'm sure if I just explain about — about blocking her _chi_, she'll understand I didn't mean to hurt her and we can be friends again." An almost fragile smile spread across her round face, and she said half to herself, "It was always better for her, when we were there."

Much as Zuko wanted to be taken in by her optimism, part of him was finding it increasingly difficult not to burst her happy bubble. It never ceased to amaze him how someone as potentially lethal as Ty Lee could be so persistently out of touch with reality. "That's … nice, but she has more problems than just —"

"Besides," Ty Lee cut him off with determined cheer, still hugging herself, "you said those doctors are making her eat now, right? So she's probably already better than when you wrote."

Zuko only gave her a long, hard look in reply. When it was apparent this had not registered sufficiently with her, he reached out to grasp her shoulders. Though he had tried to move slowly enough not to startle her, Ty Lee still jumped at his touch.

She twisted her head first to look at the hand on one shoulder, then the hand on another, then back at his face, in a reaction that might have been comical under any other circumstance. Zuko thought he could guess what she was thinking: He had never made voluntary contact with her before. The gravity of the situation was effectively conveyed.

"Ty Lee," he said hoarsely, lightly gripping her shoulders, "by the time I authorized them to force-feed her, she was almost too weak to move. They say she can't — or won't — keep down most of what they give her. She will look — very different than you remember. And if she keeps this up even a week longer —"

"No!" Ty Lee finally cried, knocking his hands away and taking a step back as if to deny his implication. "You don't get to say that — she's not going to — NO!"

Her voice threatened tears, and all Zuko could think was that she was going to start crying, and he was going to start crying, and there would be no one to stop them crying because he had made sure Mai was staying with her parents for the week. "I'm not trying to scare you," he said hastily, raising his hands in a placating gesture, "just — prepare you. For what you might see, for what might," he faltered, "happen —"

"Shut up!" Ty Lee cried fiercely, actually giving him a little push backwards. He stumbled, so surprised that he just remembered to signal two approaching guards in time to stop them from restraining her. "Just shut up, okay? You don't know her like I do!" Ty Lee insisted urgently, while the armored guards withdrew again with a few curious glances at the pink-clad acrobat. "She never gives up without a fight! She never gives up…"

Zuko ran a long-fingered hand over his face. He felt bone-weary under Ty Lee's pleading gaze, and older than he ever had at that moment. Seeing her distress made this all too real to him. "She _is_ fighting," he acknowledged heavily, "fighting inside her own mind. But she's losing." He gave the barest of pauses to let this sink in.

"I'm doing everything I can to help Azula," he tried to reassure her, though he was beginning to have trouble convincing even himself. "And you're a part of that. But I need you to know what this is. I need you to know, this could be —"

"I told you don't say it." She planted her hands stubbornly on her hips, and raised her chin in challenge. And Zuko didn't say it. He didn't have to. She would find out soon enough.

"I want to see her," Ty Lee said right on cue, in what was a hard tone for her. "You made me wait eight months, and it took me five days to get here, and I want to see her now! Please," she added politely, almost as an afterthought.

"I've arranged a royal ferry to transport you to Ember Island," Zuko replied. "You can leave as soon as you like."

She gave him a wide grin at this, her anger evaporating like morning dew. "Thanks, Zuko!" she said brightly, relaxing her stance as she moved to follow him, under the portico and back inside the palace. "And sorry I pushed you before. I just c-can't stand —"

"It's fine," he said shortly over his shoulder, hoping to avoid another of her emotional outbursts. And maybe get her to stop talking. Oddly enough, now that the opportunity had presented itself, he found that he really didn't want to talk about this. He wanted to fix it. And he supposed Ty Lee's intervention was as likely a solution as any, which was to say, not likely.

They crossed into the relative darkness of an interior hall, where braziers fixed to red marble pillars cast flickering light on rich tapestries and paneled walls. "Is Mai coming, too?" Ty Lee interrupted his thoughts. From the soft padding of skin on stone behind him and the direction of her voice, he guessed she was walking on her hands.

"No," Zuko replied, not turning his head to address her. He didn't think he could look into her too hopeful eyes, or her merrily waving feet, and still say this. "And I would appreciate it if — if you didn't mention this to her."

"Oh," Ty Lee said, looking a little downcast when he chanced a glance over his shoulder at her. She executed a graceful half-somersault forward onto her feet. Her round eyes had taken on a pale orange hue in the firelight, when she looked up to ask, "It must really bother her, huh?"

"Something like that," he said, relieved for once by Ty Lee's tendency to think the best of everyone. Zuko faced forward again as they rounded a corner onto a high-ceilinged antechamber lined with painted pillars that adjoined one of the smaller, more informal war rooms. He crossed to the double doors that opened on the council chamber, before Ty Lee recognized where they were.

"I thought we were going to the harbor?" she ventured, confusion evident in her tone. "Aren't you coming with me?"

Zuko paused with his hand upon the door handle, bracing himself for the moment he'd been dreading since his manservant announced her arrival. "I said, _you_ can leave," he reminded Ty Lee, his back still turned to her. He felt unaccountably annoyed that she had not grasped his meaning before. But then, subtle cues of expression had always been more Azula's forte than hers.

"There will be a reparations summit here in two days," he explained to the dull iron panels of the door, "with representatives from the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes, and the Avatar in attendance. I have to prepare for —" He paused, swallowing hard against the bile that rose in the back of his throat. "My advisers have called a meeting that — that I cannot miss."

He waited for Ty Lee to say something, anything. When she did not, he finally turned around, halfway expecting her to look like the human equivalent of a kicked puppy. Instead, her thin brows were drawn together, her mouth set in exactly the sort of scowl that she used to warn would give him wrinkles.

"A _meeting?_" she upbraided him, sounding every bit as incensed as when he'd called her a circus freak. "You have **a meeting?** Have you even been to see her since this started?" Ty Lee asked, thrusting her hand out as if to demand an answer.

Zuko briefly closed his eyes and turned his face away. He tried not to dwell on the unfairness that Mai's nonexistent emotional distress was a good enough reason not to visit Azula, but the welfare of international relations apparently was not.

"Have you even been to see her **at all?**" she asked reproachfully, and Zuko only glared in response, gripping the door handle so hard that his knuckles turned white. He did not particularly feel like talking about that disastrous visit to anyone, let alone Ty Lee. He had not gone back since, and she did not need to know his reasons. He was not sure he knew his reasons. Only that the longer he went without seeing Azula, the more impossible the prospect of returning seemed…

But Ty Lee could not read his thoughts, even if she claimed to see his aura. "You won't see her, and you won't let me see her," she accused him, her high voice quivering with anger. "And you wonder why she's k-killing herself?"

Zuko let his hand drop from the door handle, eyes widening. It was the harshest thing Ty Lee had ever said to him, maybe to anyone. And it was true.

"You know what? Fine!" she declared, her voice cracking and tears brimming in her eyes as she finally gave in to frustration. "I know my way to the harbor and I'll go see her maybe for the l-last time, and you can just go to your stupid meeting and see if I —" She stopped when, in the midst of her exit, Zuko stepped forward and grabbed her sleeve to detain her.

Ty Lee turned to face him again with what looked like every intention of telling him off. But something stopped her, either in his face or perhaps around the edges of him, because that was where her gaze was fixed.

Frowning, Ty Lee blinked the tears away, while Zuko looked on her who might be his last chance with no inconsiderable agony. "Tell her …" he began, but the words died in his throat. He released her sleeve when it occurred to him that he did not know what to say to his sister, and hadn't for a long time. Azula always knew just what to say.

But now Ty Lee's expression had changed to one he'd seen on his uncle's face before, a look that somehow managed to convey both understanding and disappointment. "You're going to be late for your meeting," she said gently.

"It doesn't start for twenty more minutes," he admitted, looking down.

"Okay," Ty Lee replied, and as if this had been a goodbye, turned to leave.

Zuko watched her exit out the high archway at the opposite end of the antechamber, the jaunt gone from her step. Even her long, ropy braid didn't seem to sway behind her like it usually did.

He wondered if Ty Lee could really see auras, and found himself wishing irrationally that she would tell him what his meant. And then he might have some idea how to feel, how he felt about Azula losing her mind, losing her life, losing everything…

_Have you found her?_

The sun was setting by the time Zuko removed to his mother's favorite garden for a late tea. He stood silently in the growing dark watching turtle ducklings play, while attendants set up a finely carved table and elegant chair behind him, on the white sandstone some distance from the pond. But he waved them off when they made to pour his tea for him, and seating himself at the table with a barely audible sigh, reached for the pot instead. He had proven at his uncle's shop that he was perfectly capable of serving tea, even if he did not seem to be capable of much else at the moment.

He wished he had Iroh's guidance now, as he considered how to keep reparations to the Earth Kingdom from bleeding his country dry. Zuko was not as worried about the Water Tribes, as besides having influential allies there in Sokka and especially his father, the Fire Nation's conflict with them had not been as sustained as in the Earth Kingdom. And repatriating the waterbenders captured by raiding parties had gone a long way toward building support among the tribes.

The Earth Kingdom, not surprisingly, had proven a lot more intractable. The sheer number of claims its towns and citizens had submitted for compensation had already overwhelmed his growing administration. A new solution would have to be found if he was to have any hope of confirming and addressing these claims in a timely manner — yet one more topic of conversation for what was shaping up to be another interminable summit, neither the first nor the last of his young reign. At times like these, Zuko began to think he might be more warmly disposed toward the other nations if he could only see less of them.

Zuko laid his flame headpiece on the table. He released his topknot from the pin and clasp that held it in place, detecting the beginnings of a headache coming on, and instead tucked his hair behind his ears. He might have chided himself for such ungenerous thoughts once. But after hours of meeting with advisers who lately did not seem to advise so much as make demands and engage in shouting matches with one another and occasionally even with him, Zuko was not feeling particularly generous.

It had been a bad day. And it was about to get worse.

He had just raised a cup of tea to his lips when a petite, crimson-smocked servant entered the garden and approached him, executing a polite bow with her hands held fist-to-palm. And Zuko replaced his cup on the table, wondering what fresh disaster called for his attention. "Fire Lord," she intoned, "Lady Mai requests your presence at her home."

He stifled a curse. Mai must have found out Ty Lee had come back, and why. He stood, deciding that to delay confronting the issue would only make matters worse. "Thank you for telling me so promptly," he tightly replied, though he was not feeling particularly thankful either. There would be no pleading ignorance now. "Please tell the kitchen staff I'll be taking my dinner elsewhere."

"Very good, my Lord."

_Have you found her?_

Having escaped her fawning mother, Zuko walked down the darkened hall toward the crimson curtain that opened on Mai's sitting room, only to be greeted by a sound he had never expected to hear from her.

Sobbing.

Too worried by this unexpected development to consider that her voice sounded higher than it should, Zuko brushed the curtain aside … only to realize that Ty Lee had joined her on the gold-edged sofa, crying into Mai's shoulder as if her heart were breaking. Mai ceased patting her half-heartedly on the back and gave him a look that might have skinned him alive over the back of the couch, but Zuko was too distracted by the implications to notice.

"What's wrong? What — what happened?" he demanded weakly, stopping just inside the door. The curtain fell back into place behind him.

Mai's gray-gold eyes narrowed even further, if that was possible. "You sent her to see Azula," she flatly accused him. "Alone. What do you _think_ happened?"

And Zuko relaxed fractionally. Mai would not greet him that way if — if his sister had —

Ty Lee sat up quickly at Mai's reply, her eyes red and puffy from the tears that streaked her face. "S-s-sorry, Zuko!" she squeaked. "I know you s-said not to t-tell Mai," Zuko wisely avoided meeting his fiancée's gaze at this, "but I g-got back, and you were in a meeting, and I just c-couldn't wait anymore —"

"It's fine," he reassured her hastily, crossing to their side of the sofa and, when Mai did not object, drawing up a chair from a nearby table to sit facing them. Ignoring Mai's warning look, he focused on Ty Lee. "What happened?" he asked her quietly, keeping his voice deliberately low and calm. "How is she?"

Ty Lee scooted forward on the cushion to reply, hugging herself around the middle in the absence of Mai's shoulder to cry on. "Her c-cell smelled like a s-sick room, and her face looked like a s-skull!" she wept, bowing her head against a fresh barrage of tears.

Zuko felt almost ill listening to her description, even if she wasn't telling him anything he hadn't already known or guessed. But he didn't stop her. This was the first report from someone who had known Azula, actually known her, that he'd had since Uncle Iroh.

"Her aura was almost **gone!**" Ty Lee exclaimed tearfully. "And what was there w-was —" she fell abruptly silent and shuddered, closing her eyes as if this, of all things, was too terrible to speak of.

Zuko leaned forward in his seat, speaking fast before Mai could interrupt them. "But did she _say_ anything to you?" he pressed. "Ty Lee, please, this is important."

She opened her eyes at this with a dejected sniffle, but seemed to draw the strength to continue from his full attention. "I said —

_"H-hi, Azula," Ty Lee finally managed, when she had somewhat recovered from the shock of the white-padded cell that smelled faintly of vomit and worse yet, her oldest friend lying like a discarded rag doll on her side, staring into the space just right of the open door. _

_Azula's eyes watched the corner from sunken sockets ringed with dark circles. Her cheeks were frighteningly hollow, her skin too pale from long confinement and stretched tight over harsh features. The jutting bones of her hips and shoulders were prominent even beneath the shapeless asylum uniform she wore, whose short sleeves exposed her painfully thin arms. _

_The one she lay on was tucked behind her while the other extended toward the empty corner, her fingers open and reaching. Her hair was a tangled mess, but it looked no longer than Ty Lee remembered, so they must at least be cutting it. As Ty Lee stepped closer, she could hear something … not right about the way Azula breathed, just slightly too fast or too shallow, or both._

_Ty Lee glanced once behind her to make sure the silent guards in the antechamber would not interfere, before she knelt beside the princess, bracing her hands against her knees. "Um, Azula?" she tried again and blinked helplessly against the tears that stung her eyes, despite her best efforts to remain cheerful for her friend._

_Azula blinked once, slowly, but did not look away from the corner. "What are you doing here, Ty Lee?" she asked thickly, her voice curiously devoid of inflection, until she added, "I thought you had _real_ friends now."_

_"You _are_ my real friend —" Ty Lee began earnestly, but faltered when the princess turned her head to regard her._

_"And who could doubt it," Azula slowly replied, and there was something still wrong with her voice, "after you so publicly betrayed me?" The fingers of her extended hand curled futilely, as if she could not quite clench them into a fist._

_But even on the edge of starvation, the force of her gaze was not diminished in the slightest. Ty Lee swallowed hard, and steeled herself to explain. "Y-you were going to hurt Mai," she reminded her almost desperately, leaning forward now, her hands pressed against the white-padded floor and her braid falling to one side of her shoulders. "I couldn't let —"_

_"She hurt me first," Azula said almost to herself, as if she were only half-listening to Ty Lee. The acrobat had not yet guessed what divided her attention._

_"But … can't you understand _why?_" Ty Lee asked her, incredulous. "You would have let those guards kill Zuko! If they cut the lines, he could have died!" Her hurt and frustration with Azula's callous actions on that day, on so many days, finally bubbled over. "How could you do that?" Ty Lee demanded, and angry blotches colored her cheeks. "How could you —"_

_Ty Lee stopped when she noticed for the first time how Azula seemed almost to shrink before her eyes, just barely drawing her emaciated arms and legs closer to her body, and folding inward until the ridges of her vertebrae became visible beneath the red-dyed cotton of her shirt. She wasn't looking at Ty Lee anymore, but directed her gaze at the floor, her teeth clenched in a pained expression._

_Ty Lee stared. She had only ever known one person to produce this kind of reaction in her friend._

_And Azula whispered, "You were right, Father. You were right." Ty Lee suppressed a shudder, and actually had to stop herself from looking up to confirm that Ozai was not looming them over them even now, so complete was the hopelessness in her voice. Zuko had warned her about the hallucinations, hadn't he? But it was a different matter entirely seeing her friend actively tormented by them._

_"He was worthless, and a traitor," Azula bitterly agreed. But her words were strained, as if they wounded her even to speak. "He didn't even care that I lied for him. Why else would he tell you, when he knew what you would —" She grimaced, drawing her limbs in closer as if to shield herself against … Ty Lee didn't know what, before she spat, "Why else would he tell you, and _leave?_"_

_Ty Lee had to bite her lip to keep from crying, as she thought of Azula confined here for all these months, visited only by doctors who didn't know her, the phantoms of people who'd hurt her … and dark thoughts like these. Was it any wonder she was doing this? Would Ty Lee have the strength _not_ to do this, if she were imprisoned so long without prospect of release? _

_And she remembered Azula's orders at the Boiling Rock. _Put them somewhere I'll never have to see their faces again, and let them **rot!**_ She had not visited Ty Lee or Mai in the weeks between their imprisonment and her defeat. Would she really have left them there this long? Ty Lee wondered._

_It didn't matter._

_What Azula did, or would have done, did not decide what Ty Lee did. Her friend was here now, and she needed her. And angry as she had been to learn of Zuko's neglect, Ty Lee couldn't let her think these things about her brother. With her father serving a life sentence in the capital prison and her mother still missing, he was effectively the only family Azula had left._

_"He didn't mean to hurt you, Azula," Ty Lee said, recalling how lost Zuko had looked when he tried to think of something, anything Ty Lee could tell her that might help his sister. _

_Her throat tightened when she reached out to grasp her friend's bony wrist and felt her weak, thready pulse and the dryness of her skin, how it burned as if she suffered some unnatural fever. And Ty Lee said what she had needed to say all these months, though her voice shook a little. "I didn't mean to hurt you."_

_Azula didn't look up from the white-padded floor, did not even react except to tonelessly reply, "I don't care."_

_It was just what Ty Lee had dreaded to hear, and still she couldn't stop herself from asking, "W-what?"_

_Her friend looked up at her this time, and Ty Lee almost quailed under the intensity of that familiar gaze. "I don't care — what you _meant_. I care — what you _did_," she bit out, as if the combination of her anger and shortness of breath made it difficult for her to speak. "And I care — that it never happens again."_

_She yanked her wrist from Ty Lee's grip, and briefly closed her eyes, as if to compose herself. "Go home, Ty Lee," she said more clearly after a long moment, her every word falling like a lead weight. "You've paid your respects to the dead."_

_It was impossible to describe the sudden fear that gripped her at those words. Hadn't she come here knowing what Azula was trying to do? And yet, this was the closest she had come to admitting it, and Ty Lee would not, could not listen to this anymore. "No!" she cried desperately, seizing Azula's arm again as if to pull her back from the edge of some imaginary precipice. "I won't leave you, Azula, I won't!"_

_Azula smiled bitterly, and Ty Lee felt her heart sink when she realized how her words had failed to reach her. "But you _did_ leave, you did," the princess reminded her cruelly, though she evinced no satisfaction when Ty Lee flinched. "And you don't get to come back."_

_"Azula —"_

_"No." She silenced Ty Lee with a single word, as only Azula could. "I decide how this ends. _I decide!_" she snapped in sudden fury, and the insane light in her brown-gold eyes scared Ty Lee not a little. "Not you. Not Zuko. Not a-anyone…" She shuddered as her temper flagged, along with her strength. But the resolve that hardened her wasted face didn't falter. And it occurred to Ty Lee for the first time that this might not have happened to Azula, if she had only been a lesser person._

_But for all her flexibility, there were some matters on which Ty Lee would never bend. And this was one of them. "I won't leave you again," the acrobat repeated stubbornly. "You're my friend and I want you to get better and I'm going to stay here 'til you do!" she said in a rush before Azula could interrupt her, and gave her fragile arm a reassuring squeeze._

_But the princess showed no signs of wanting to speak anymore, and looked almost too exhausted to try. Neither did Azula give any response, except to close her eyes. A slight frown creased her cracked lips, and her dark brows drew together, as if with troubled dreams._

_Ty Lee told herself Azula was just tired. It still felt like a rejection. "I mean, who else is going to fix your hair?" she tried with desperate cheer, scooting closer to run her fingers through the unruly strands. "It looks like they haven't — even — been —"_

_And she stuttered to a halt when she brought her hand away, along with a clump of Azula's hair. The bare patch of scalp where it used to be glared at her like an accusation, and Ty Lee almost choked._

_"Oh g-gosh, your hair! Azula …" And Ty Lee could not stop the tears that spilled from her eyes, because Azula was looking at her again, and she did not look surprised, oh Agni, she did not look surprised or even angry or as if anything had just happened that should concern her at all —_

_She really was crazy. Ty Lee was not sure she had believed it, until this moment. And Azula said, "Could you please not cry so shrilly, Ty Lee? You're giving me a headache."_

_Ty Lee positively wailed at this, and as swiftly as she'd blocked her _chi_ that day, tugged Azula into a backwards hug, as if the princess were a doll she was clutching to her chest — an impression only reinforced by the lightness of her small frame. "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!" Ty Lee wept into her tangled hair, and didn't hear Azula draw a sharp breath. Had she been paying attention, Ty Lee might have guessed at the pain that flared to life in her cramped muscles, atrophied from long disuse, when the acrobat grabbed her. But she was probably too overwhelmed for that right now._

_"I'm so, _so_ sorry," Ty Lee whispered brokenly, and was rewarded when after a moment Azula reached up with one slender hand, as if to pry apart the arms that bound her chest … and held Ty Lee's wrist in a loose grip instead. _

_"Always the same arguments," she wearily replied, her tone halting irregularly. "Will you never tire of it?" _

_And Ty Lee tried not to betray any outward sign of the awful thrill that raced through her at this. She had wondered, of course, ever since Zuko revealed that Azula was hallucinating his presence and her mother's, whether Ty Lee would be included among that number. _

_On the one hand, she could understand the horror he'd expressed in his letter. That there was some figment of herself that could be saying or doing anything to Azula, and the princess might blame her for it, did worry Ty Lee. A larger part of her though, was almost grateful that she could be there for her friend in some sense, even when she couldn't be there. _

_But apparently Azula disagreed. She bowed her head until her hair fell like a curtain before her face to hide her exposed scalp, and when she spoke, her voice was muffled. "How many times do I have to banish you, before you will heed me?"_

_"Never!" she said fervently, blinking back tears and holding Azula tighter the more heavily she leaned against Ty Lee's arms and the lower her bowed head sank. "You're my friend and always —" But Ty Lee stopped abruptly when she felt Azula's hand fall from its grip on her arm, and her head droop into the crook of it. Something wet and sticky was dripping from her wild hair, onto Ty Lee's arm and the white-padded floor._

_It was blood._

_Ty Lee uttered a gasp so tiny the guards standing like statues in the open antechamber did not even hear her. Frantically, she turned Azula's limp form over in her arms, and tore aside the matted hair that obscured her face, heedless of how much she was tearing _out_ at the same time. _

_Her eyes were closed and her nose was bleeding, so much that the whole lower half of her face was streaked with it. Azula was chalk-white, paler even than she had been before, and it just made the blood stand out that much more starkly._

_And that was when Ty Lee started screaming._

"I th-thought she was **dead!**" Ty Lee wept into her hands, while Mai watched her skeptically, as if to say, _From a nosebleed?_ "But the g-guards called an orderly, and he checked her and s-said she just fainted, and she gets the nosebleeds from, uh, v-vitamin deficiency and that's why her hair is f-falling out, and her tongue is swollen from dehydration and that's why her voice sounded _—"_

Zuko had no way of knowing it, but he looked almost as white as Azula had in her padded cell, while he half-listened to Ty Lee babble. There were no words for this. And even if there had been, he could not have said them. He could feel his throat close with the tears he couldn't shed, because they would only provoke Ty Lee to further hysterics, and Mai —

His fiancée stopped Ty Lee with a hand on her shoulder, and the acrobat jumped and turned to face her, seemingly having forgotten Mai was there. "I want you to stay here tonight," she said, in a tone that brooked no argument. "Tell the servants I said to prepare you a guest room."

"Oh, I c-couldn't!" Ty Lee replied, her round eyes widening in evident alarm. "I've already stayed too long, and I have to get back to Azula —"

"You said the doctors were keeping her sedated until morning," Mai reminded her flatly, letting go of her shoulder to slouch back against the arm of the couch. "And I can tell the servants to wake you early. You'll be back before she knows you're gone."

Ty Lee bit her lip in apparent deliberation, before asking, "Promise you'll wake me up first thing?"

"The servants will wake you," Mai corrected her. "You can't expect me to get up that early for anything less than the apocalypse."

"You got up that early for Azula," Ty Lee objected, remembering their campaigns in the Earth Kingdom.

"Same difference," Mai said, with her characteristic shrug.

"Oh, okay," Ty Lee easily replied, and the furrow between her brows was smoothed away. "Well … thanks, Mai!" she brightened a little at the unexpected prospect of sleeping over. Mai had never extended such invitations when they were younger. "And thanks for listening, I'm so glad you were home!" she added, bouncing across the cushions to hug her gloomy friend around the shoulders.

"Sure," Mai said nonchalantly, looking with some resentment at the still-brooding Zuko over Ty Lee's shoulder. He pretended not to notice. "It's not like I had anything better to do."

"You're such a good friend!" Ty Lee gushed, releasing Mai.

"Whatever," she dully replied. "Dinner will be served soon, so see about your room now. I want you to go to bed straight after," Mai concluded almost sternly.

"Good idea," Ty Lee agreed, standing up from the couch. "I don't want to oversleep tomorrow! See you at dinner, Mai." She took her leave abruptly, without sparing a glance in his direction when she added, "Zuko."

But Mai looked long and inscrutably at him after Ty Lee skipped from the room, before she finally spoke. "You. Up. Right now."

Zuko shot her a swift glare at this and surged to his feet in a fit of pique, striding over to a window that opened on the dark and imposing facade of the palace. He stopped there briefly with his back to Mai, and looked out unseeing. His hands gripped the windowsill to keep them from shaking. He turned to face her certain rebuke —

Her arms closed around him, her chin tucked securely against his shoulder. And for a moment, Zuko couldn't move, couldn't think, could not even react …

In two quick breaths, his anger crumbled to despair. His hands shot up to grasp the back of her robe and he wept into her hair, wordless except for the almost animal sounds of suffering that issued from the deepest part of his throat — the part of him beyond words, beyond expression, beyond reason. His whole body shook with the intensity of his pain, and Mai laid a cool hand against the back of his neck to steady him.

It worked to calm his ragged breathing, and Zuko remembered himself enough to withdraw from her, glancing away to regain his composure … and try to hide the fact that he was sniffling not a little.

"Well, now that you've gotten snot in my hair," Mai began, in her usual deadpan, "I guess I'm entitled to ask what the hell you were thinking?"

Zuko looked quickly up at her, confusion written over his scarred face, its shadows drawn deeper in the soft light of the room. He ran his hand quickly over his right cheek to wipe away the tears that streaked it.

"When I said Ty Lee shouldn't see her," Mai explained, with surprising gentleness, "I wasn't just being vindictive. I thought something like this might happen, and I'm kind of amazed you _didn't_."

And Zuko felt slightly ashamed, not because he hadn't foreseen this outcome, but because he **had** and decided to privilege Azula's life over Ty Lee's emotional well-being anyway. But he felt certain Mai knew this besides, and was simply being too polite to say so. And not for the first time, he wished for all the things she wouldn't say.

"She protected me from Azula when it mattered most," Mai reminded him, crossing her arms where they stood beside the window. "And I hoped to do the same for her. Now I can't. So I'd kind of like to know why you sent her," she concluded impassively, without any hint of the impatience that should probably accompany such a question.

Zuko answered her with mild disbelief. "You heard Ty Lee. You know what I've kept from you, just as you asked," he added bitterly. "She's **dying**, Mai! My _sister_ is dying!" Zuko cried, punctuating this pronouncement with an angry thrust of his hand.

"You don't need to yell, I'm right here," Mai remarked without expression. "And isn't this the same sister who tried to _kill you_ on multiple occasions?"

"She wasn't in her right mind —"

"And if she were, then what?" Mai cut him off before he could continue, reminding him oddly of his uncle. _You never think these things through!_ "She would _love_ you?"

Zuko took a quick step back and looked at Mai as if she had slapped him, his golden eyes wide with hurt. He could not quite believe she'd just said that.

To her credit, Mai repented of her words almost immediately, her remorse sufficient even to register on her face. "Zuko, I'm sorry," she sighed, uncrossed her arms in a silent concession. "It's just that, I can't help but be reminded of — of how it was with your father." Zuko blinked once in surprise at the comparison, though he didn't interrupt her. "You made so many excuses for him, blamed yourself for _his_ failings, for so long…" Mai explained, before falling silent with a gesture both helpless and vaguely annoyed.

But her eyes almost pleaded with him to understand, and Zuko thought he did now, better than before. He closed the distance between them, and took her hands in his. "She's not my father," he finally said. "He didn't love anything or anyone, except himself. And even then, I wonder…" he trailed off, frowning in thought. "She _does_ love, Mai. She does," he concluded quietly. "She just doesn't know how to show it."

And Zuko briefly closed his eyes against the image of Azula standing at the porch steps of their abandoned summer home. _I thought I'd find you here._ The hint almost of playfulness in her voice, when she spoke to him on the outskirts of the city. _Believe it or not, I'm looking out for you._ Her warm hand on his shoulder in the throne room of the deposed Earth King. _Today, you restored your _own_ honor._

He had forgotten how warm she was, as if her fire burned inside her always, as much a part of her as her soul. _As if she suffered some unnatural fever._ She was sick even then. Maybe she always had been. And he hadn't seen it.

He hadn't seen it.

Mai let go of his hands and reached up to caress the uninjured side of his face, recalling him to the present. "I guess I just don't see what you hope to accomplish by sending Ty Lee to her," she explained. "Did you honestly think desperate pleas of friendship were going to change her mind? She's _Azula_," Mai said dismissively.

Zuko paused, before admitting to her, "I have … another plan."

And Mai let her hand drop, taking a step back as if she suddenly felt the need to evaluate him from a more objective distance. "_What_ other plan?" she demanded.

_Have you found her?_

"What do you _mean_, you won't do it?" Zuko raged, at one of the oldest spirits in existence. The flames in the trough that edged the throne behind him flared almost to the ceiling.

The young Avatar flinched, but clutched the staff of his glider more tightly to him, as if to bolster his resolve. "Zuko," he said with utter certainty, "it would kill her."

"Have you **seen** her?!" Zuko demanded, and tried to ignore the mocking voice that whispered in his heart, _Have _you?

It sounded like Azula.

"She's dying _now_, Aang!" he argued, spreading his hands at the absurdity of having to point this out to him. "And this is her last chance! You **said** you would _do_ this!" Zuko accused him.

"I said I would consider it. I said I would visit her. And I did," Aang reminded him, almost apologetically. "But Zuko, you **don't** know what you're asking —"

"Yes, I do!" he cried petulantly, pounding a flaming fist into a panel of the stone trough behind him. "If you just take away her _bending_, I could bring her **home** again! She'd do better here, I _know_ it…"

And Aang's gray eyes softened. It wasn't the first time he'd heard this plan. "You don't understand —" he tried more gently. But Zuko was in no mood to hear it.

"I **know** what I'm _asking!_" he insisted, practically clutching his hair in frustration. "You're the Avatar! You **fix** things! _That's your job!_" Zuko railed at him, and brought his clenched fists down in sharp arcs trailed with fire, advancing on Aang. "So _fix_ her!"

"Zuko —" Aang retreated only to find his way blocked by one of the many pillars that lined the semidarkness of the cavernous throne room, and Zuko seized the front of his shirt.

"**Fix her!**" he shouted, his voice breaking. Tears streamed from his right eye, and his hands burned so hot they singed Aang's clothes.

"It's not that simple!" Aang cried, dropping his staff and holding up his hands in a placating gesture that did nothing whatsoever to calm the almost frantic firebender. "You can't — you can't make her _choose_ life. You just have to trust that she will," he said reluctantly. "And if she doesn't, you have to know … it's not your fault."

Zuko released him at these words, along with a shuddering breath. He could not draw any comfort from Aang's advice, he could only blame himself. He turned from Aang, nearly clipping him on the nose with the pointed edge of the black mantle on his shoulders, and took a few ponderous steps away.

He stopped and bowed his head, his five-point crown gleaming in the torchlight, before he turned to look with haunted eyes into the flames that danced in the long stone trough. Zuko crossed his arms, and the young airbender retrieved his glider staff from the black tile floor and straightened, glancing up at him in clear concern.

The burned half of his face was turned toward Aang, so the flickering light cast deep shadows in the creases of his scar. His mouth turned down in a characteristic scowl, his damaged eye narrowed nearly to a slit. "What am I supposed to do, Aang?" Zuko finally addressed the flames, maintaining an even tone only with difficulty. "Sit here in comfort while my sister _starves?_"

Aang could only stare sadly back at him. He had no answers for his friend.

But Zuko continued to look into the fire, could not meet Aang's eyes when he unhappily admitted, "She's a _part_ of me." _Together, we could almost be a whole person._ "I **can't** lose her. Even if I don't _see_ her," he tried to explain, and turned not quite toward Aang, "even if I don't talk to her, I **have** to know she's alive somewhere." And Zuko raised his eyes to regard him, hoping they would convey what his words could not. "Can't you understand that?"

"I do," Aang sought to reassure him, taking a tentative step toward Zuko. "And you're my friend," he added almost desperately. "Zuko, you're one of my **best** friends."

Zuko unbound his arms and turned fully toward him at this. Something that felt heartbreakingly like hope tugged at the corners of his mouth, before Aang concluded, "And that's exactly why, I _can't_ let you make this mistake."

There were several silent seconds in which every bit of warmth drained from Zuko's expression, until he was looking at him in a way he hadn't for a long time. It was the look that said he'd like to turn Aang into a scorch mark on the floor.

And Zuko replied, "You're so full of shit." Aang's eyes widened in shock, before he tensed with the first hint of genuine offense he'd shown in their entire confrontation. "You spare a heartless monster like my **father**, and you won't save _her?_" Zuko objected, taking a quick step toward him and bringing his clenched fist up before he let down his hand. "Why?"

"Because I **can't**, okay?" Aang cried in frustration, whipping his glider to the side as if for emphasis. "And neither can you! I think," he concluded, rubbing the back of his bald head and glancing briefly down, "I think only _she_ can."

"Well, that absolves you nicely, doesn't it?" Zuko snapped, but even he could hear the cracks in his own voice, how it grew more ragged with every word he spoke. "You're just like everyone else, so _willing_ to give up on her!" Zuko accused him, unconvinced by the studied compassion in Aang's open face. "You don't know! You don't know…" he said almost to himself, and closed his eyes against it.

"Know what?" Aang asked him, a little uncomfortably.

Zuko fixed him with a icy glare, and curtly replied, "Forget it. Just go." He turned from Aang to face the throne again, and clasping his hands together behind his back, dismissed him with ominous quiet. "I'll see you at the summit."

But Aang hesitated. Zuko could feel the airbender's eyes on his back, on shoulders that shook with the effort of supporting a weight he had borne for too long. Aang stepped forward and reached out a hand to him. "Zuko," he tried again, "I _am_ sorry…"

"Get out!" he roared, and the flames in the trough flared up again when he clenched fists at his sides. Aang complied a little sadly, sparing a glance over his shoulder as he retreated to the curtained archway at the opposite end of the hall.

Zuko just managed to refrain from anymore outbursts until Aang had left the room, at which point he directed a fireball at the black tile floor with a wordless howl of rage. "What am I supposed to _do?!_" he demanded of the eaves high overhead.

They did not even echo his words back at him, despite the scope of the chamber. The sound was swallowed by the dark edges of the throne room, perhaps absorbed by those heavy curtains Azula always liked to hide behind. He grimaced.

Parting the orange flames, Zuko vaulted over the stone trough and onto the raised platform that housed his throne seat. He stood from his crouch and approached the throne, but stopped at one of the corkscrew pillars that supported the elaborate canopy, and leaned against it instead. He wanted something solid at his back.

He slid slowly down the pillar until he sat with one knee propped upright and his arm draped over it, the other bent beneath him. The fingers of the hand he'd braced against the floor curled into a fist when he recalled Aang's words. _Because I __**can't**__, okay? And neither can you!_

How was he supposed to save her? She had always saved herself…

_Zuko watched her armored form tumble through the mists at the Western Air Temple. And even seated in the sky bison's saddle, he felt like he was still falling._

Ty Lee had made no more progress with her in the last two days. Now Aang refused to help. This was one drop she wouldn't pull out of, and there was no one there to catch her. There was never anyone there to catch her.

And he whispered, "She's not going to make it."

Zuko bent his head, and dwelt again on the same question that had plagued him for months. Why couldn't _he_ help her? Why did he have to ask Aang and Ty Lee and a whole staff of doctors when he was her brother and he was the Fire Lord, and there was nothing, _nothing_ he could do for her, nothing he could say… What use was all his power if he couldn't even make her stop hurting herself? If —

If she could still hurt him, even now?

_Of course she could_, he thought, and closed his eyes with a bitter sigh, exhaling flames with his breath. She was Azula. She lived to laugh at his torment.

But how much longer she would was anyone's guess. She grew weaker every day she refused to eat, and her doctors had given up on force-feeding her, saying her dehydration only worsened every time she was sick, and that would kill her faster than simple lack of food. They could offer no solutions, and only little time.

It wasn't enough, and he knew it. But that didn't mean he had to accept it.

There had to be something he could do, some option he hadn't tried. What was he missing? He should know her better than anyone. He should know her better than anyone.

Except…


	3. A Choice

"Hello, Father."

Ozai's lip curled at the slightest pause between Zuko's greeting and address, tugging at the straggly beard that had grown to line his jaw. "Not going to call me by _name_ anymore?" he sneered, raising a mocking brow where he reclined on a pallet at the back of his cell. "And to think, your pathetic attempts at insolence were the last amusement left to me."

"I'm not here to argue titles," Zuko retorted from the other side of the bars.

"Then _why_ are you here?" his father demanded, abruptly sitting up in the torchlight that spilled over him from the hall outside and twisting to face Zuko. He smiled cruelly, brushing the matted hair back from his face. "Have you found her?"

His brow furrowed. "Found _who?_"

"Your mother," Ozai said lightly, crossing his bare feet beneath his legs. "What else would bring you to my lowly cell? After all, you aren't going to _ask_ me again."

And Zuko glared poisonously at him, remembering their last visit in which he'd finally given up on grilling his father for information he would never give. In which he'd sworn to find his mother without Ozai's help.

Now here he stood again, no closer to finding her than he had been before. He knew it and his father knew it, and furthermore seemed to regard this as some kind of victory. A muscle twitched in Zuko's jaw, and Ozai's smirk widened.

"But of course, I forgot," he amended, gold eyes gleaming in the distant firelight, "you never bring me good news unless it's a _lie_."

_He didn't even care that I lied for him._

"What did you do to Azula?" Zuko demanded without entirely meaning to, his father's words recalling Ty Lee's account to him.

His dancing eyes went flat and cruel, an odd stillness crept over his face. "You're going to have to be more specific."

"When I told you she lied about the Avatar, the day I left to join him," Zuko said a little uncertainly and crossed his arms, his eyes searching Ozai's face, "did you punish her?"

That hateful grin fixed back in place. "Did you _want_ me to?"

"Just answer the **question!**" Zuko snapped in sudden fury, loath to dwell on what Ozai had asked. His fists clenched at his sides and he took a step forward, as if to compel the truth from him. "What did you _do?_"

Rather than meet his son's anger with his own, Ozai just looked bored. He shrugged minimally, lacing his long white fingers together in his lap. "I made sure it never happens again." Seeing Zuko squeeze his eyes shut and grimace in growing aggravation, he coldly concluded, "I would not expect you to understand. You still haven't learned your own lesson."

And Zuko's gaze fixed on him again, to find Ozai looking on his scar with clear contempt. "She always _was_ a quicker study," he added casually, twisting the knife. But his father's voice was full of the same quiet satisfaction he regularly exhibited when speaking of Azula, and Zuko did not know what to make of his evasions. Hadn't she been his favorite? Hadn't —

"My time may not be worth much to you," Ozai interrupted his thoughts, arching his eyebrows in evident annoyance and resting his hands on his knees, "but keep _wasting_ it like this and you'll find out just how uncooperative I can be."

Zuko scowled at his ultimatum, and the fact that he still felt qualified to make one at all. But he had admit that his father was right, at least in this case. He had come here on more important business than uncovering the past.

Drawing a deep breath to brace himself, he took a last step forward and sat down opposite his father on the cool stone floor. If Ozai felt any surprise at the gesture, he didn't show it. "You came here to talk about Azula?" he prompted tersely. "So talk."

"You know that … I had her committed?" Zuko began, looking down almost involuntarily.

"I am aware," Ozai coldly replied, his reaction as muted as it had been when Zuko first told him about her psychotic break on the day of Sozin's Comet.

"Azula is —" He paused and briefly closed his eyes, trying to organize his thoughts. "She's getting worse."

"You mean to say the **best** medical minds haven't succeeded in turning her into _your mother_ yet?" Ozai said, his voice practically dripping with scorn. "What a shame."

Zuko twitched visibly at his dismissal, looking up in resentment. "She's _starving herself_," he snapped, and got a hollow sort of satisfaction when the sneer fell from Ozai's face. "She refuses water, too. Her doctors have tried force-feeding her, but she just rejects everything they give her. She has a few **days**, at most, before she _dies_ from it."

His father seemed to have nothing to say to this, so Zuko continued, "I've tried everything I can think of to get her to stop. I sent Ty Lee to talk to her…" He paused at the blank look Ozai gave him.

"Her _friend?_" Zuko reminded him in disbelief, turning his hands palms up. His father blinked once, but gave no sign of recognition. "The **acrobat!**" Zuko barked, and his hands balled into fists on his thighs.

"We could do this all day, you know," Ozai remarked impassively, "but I was under the impression you were working on a tight schedule."

Zuko clutched his head in his hands, and had to grit his teeth against a sudden rush of hatred for this man. She was his favorite. She was his favorite.

And he didn't even know who her friends were.

Zuko closed his eyes and let out a long breath, before glaring determinedly down at the floor and resuming his narrative. "Azula won't listen to her friend, but I thought maybe, a change of scene …"

He let his hands drop and just hung his head, recalling his unsatisfying interview with Aang. "I would bring her home, but I **can't**. The way Azula is now, she'd be a danger to herself, and everyone around her, as soon as she recovered. I asked the Avatar to take away her bending —"

He stopped at the sharp intake of breath across from him, and looked up to see Ozai gripping his knees in white-knuckled hands, his arms bent as if he would lunge at Zuko, were it not for the bars between them. "I should give you _another scar_ to match the **first!**" he roared, his tone escalating such that Zuko instinctively brought his arm up as if to shield himself from the fire blast that would never come again.

Ozai rushed the bars with surprising speed to kneel clutching them, and Zuko lowered his hand a little crossly. "You would deny Azula her **element**, and pretend any motive but _jealousy?_" his father demanded, golden eyes alight with a murderous rage like Zuko hadn't seen since the Day of Black Sun. "As if you haven't been waiting for any **excuse** since the Avatar did this to _me _—"

"That's **enough!**" Zuko shouted, recovering from his shock sufficiently to spring to his feet. "What would you know about _helping_ someone?" he spat, looking down on his father in bitter reproach. "I'm trying to **help** her! I'm trying —"

"And _failing_," Ozai cut him, his bearded lip twisting into a snarl.

Zuko looked away with an angry shudder, clenching his teeth so hard his jaw hurt. "It doesn't matter anyway," he said at last, grudgingly. He locked eyes with his incensed father. "Aang refused."

Ozai let go of the bars with a slow exhalation, and settled back into his seat on the bare stone floor, like a monster from the lightless depths withdrawing into its watery den. His eyes were still narrowed in suspicion, but his black brows weren't drawn so sharply now, as he considered his son's account.

After a long moment, he very calmly asked, "Am I to understand then, that I am your last resort?"

"Yes," Zuko bit out. He knew this was coming, knew it and hated Azula not a little for putting him in this position. He hadn't wanted to come here again.

Resting his elbows on his knees, Ozai steepled his fingers and pressed the tips of them into the crease between his brows. He bowed his head and closed his eyes in thought, his mouth turning down into a scowl not unlike the one his son wore, watching him. Zuko could only imagine what sort of advantages he must be calculating…

His father looked up again, and draped his forearms over his knees. Zuko braced himself for a lengthy negotiation of terms.

"She doesn't need my help," he finally pronounced.

And Zuko blinked. "What? Haven't you been list—"

"But she would help _herself_, if you would only **let** her," Ozai concluded impatiently. And now it was Zuko's turn to be silent.

"Let me paint you a picture," his father continued, darkly bitter, "of what your sister's days consist of now: She never leaves her padded cell, except for prearranged times when she is hauled off to mandatory therapy sessions or to be cleaned up by orderlies, to the extent they even bother. She eats the same tasteless gruel everyday, and has no input as to when or what she is served.

"She has no other outlet for conversation or news of the world than guards and orderlies who have been instructed not to talk to her, or doctors who are happy enough to talk **at** her, and call this progress. Oh, and her hallucinations," Ozai added offhandedly, and Zuko flinched at the disregard with which he tossed this out. "But she is probably lucid enough sometimes, or on some level, to know that these aren't real.

"She hasn't bent fire for months, and hasn't seen the sun for longer. And every day she rots in that asylum, her extraordinary mind and talents go to _waste_," his father said, in the falling tone he had often adopted when shooting down his advisors' plans.

His gaze had not left his son's in all the time he spoke, and only grew more pointed when he concluded, "She _feels_ it, Zuko. How could she **not** feel the loss of everything that made her what she was, the loss of the ability to make even the simplest decisions for herself? In what _world_, exactly, did you think this would end well for her?"

"How do you know —" Zuko began to reply, his eyes widening with a growing suspicion of how aware his father seemed to be of the terms of Azula's confinement. He had taken care to have their respective guards changed regularly and without warning, and that there should be no overlap between them…

But Ozai's flat stare put an end to his speculation. Of course, it occurred to him, the conditions of his father's imprisonment were not that different from Azula's. And what he didn't know, he could just as easily guess. It wasn't as if he had much else to do with his time … Zuko hoped.

He swallowed hard. "And supposing your assessment is correct?" he barely conceded, in a hard tone. "Is there a _point_ to it?"

"Yes," Ozai shortly replied. "Did it ever occur you, that she might _not_ be trying to kill herself?"

"That doesn't make sense," Zuko rejoined, unable to keep an edge of impatience from his voice. "She's **dying**, I've _told_ you —"

"I'm not disputing the outcome," Ozai interrupted with disturbing equanimity, "only that that is her _purpose_ in starving herself."

Zuko could not help looking on him with plain disgust. It made his skin crawl to remember it was the gruesome death of his fifteen year old daughter that Ozai contemplated so casually. But he remained silent, if only for the sake of ending this sooner.

"Azula is … like fire," his father explained, a satisfied light coming into his eyes at the aptness of the metaphor. "You can't contain her without killing her, at least eventually. If you take every choice away from her, she will reassert her ability to choose in any way she can, even if it destroys her."

And Zuko took a step closer at this, feeling that at last he was onto something, as Ozai held up his hand to count off the alternatives. "Whether by isolating her," he raised his index finger, "or sedating her, or physically restraining her, or drugging her food — you have the means to deny her every choice … but _this_ one," he concluded quietly, joining his fingers to point his open palm at Zuko like an offering. It was a gesture he'd seen Azula make so many times that the effect was unnerving.

"You can't _make_ her eat or drink. You can try to force her, but you can't make her keep it down," his father elaborated flatly. "Her body is still her own, for at least a little longer. You can't take that away from her, and she is not about to let you.

"You thought to lock an inferno away in that cell," Ozai returned to the metaphor, "and made the mistake of leaving a gap in the door. And she is going to take that door, regardless of what lies on the other side. Because that is what fire _does_, Zuko," he grimly pronounced. "It grows. Or it dies."

Zuko was barely aware enough of his surroundings by this point to notice he'd closed the distance to the bars, and knelt opposite his father, clutching them as if for support. Of course. Of course! How could he not see it? She'd even **said**…

_I decide! Not you. Not Zuko. Not anyone._

But even knowing the problem did not bring Zuko any closer to solving it that he could tell, and he put the question to his father this time, instead of Aang or the dusty eaves, "What am I supposed to do? I can't free her, you know I can't," he added quickly, to forestall a protest Ozai showed no signs of making. "Even if she were declared sane, she would have to be tried for her crimes."

"Like _you_ were tried?" his father observed, though he looked like he did so against his better judgment.

"It's not the same!" Zuko objected. "I **joined** the side of good, at great risk to myself —"

"At great risk to someone _else_, too," Ozai added dryly. "And I don't think she was consulted in the matter."

"It's not my fault she decided to lie!" He let go of the bars as if burned.

"Very good, Zuko," his father sarcastically replied. "Why should you be your sister's keeper? You've proven a miserable failure at it so far —"

"**Shut up!**" Zuko howled, striking the bars so hard that they clanged dully, and Ozai had to scramble to the back of his cell to avoid the gout of flame his son loosed in anger. "You don't know anything _about_ it! Like she wouldn't do the **same** to me, if you two had won?" he demanded, clutching his now-throbbing forearm. "Or execute me out of hand? At least I'm _giving_ her a trial!"

Ozai just looked at him, obviously unimpressed — with Zuko's loss of control, with his argument, or with both, it was less clear. He deliberately settled himself on the cot again, sitting with his legs tucked beneath him, while Zuko took a deep breath and then another to calm himself. He was so angry he could practically hear his own blood pounding in his ears.

"I don't know what she _would_ have done, and neither do you," Ozai finally reminded him, fixing Zuko with a piercing gaze, though he kept his expression carefully neutral. "I only know what she **did**.

"I only know that you had proven yourself a traitor to this nation many times over, by resisting arrest, by subverting her attempts to capture the Avatar, by threatening injury to her royal person on several occasions. And Azula orchestrated your return home and back into my good graces, for no other price than your help in subduing a city she had already effectively conquered."

His gaze turned inward, and he frowned to himself before admitting, "The thing I don't understand, is _why_ she would do it."

"Well, that makes two of us," Zuko said bitterly, sitting back on his heels and holding onto his bruising arm more loosely now. "But I won't release her," he added after a moment, looking across at Ozai. "I **can't**."

"I never said you had to," his father evenly replied, shifting to sit cross-legged again, with his back against the wall. "But you will be hard-pressed to convince her to stop," he warned. "She has tasted success, and even if it tastes like ash, she'll hold onto it. What else does she have?"

Zuko decided to treat this as a rhetorical question, and asked instead, albeit reluctantly, "Then what do you suggest?"

"Specifically?" Ozai clasped his fingers together in his lap. "I suggest she be allowed to practice her firebending again."

"What?!" Zuko cried, starting to his feet to take a quick step back. "You're as crazy as _she_ is! Why would I let her **bend** again after all the suffering she's caused?" he demanded, the ridges of his brows contracted with suspicion.

His father paused only briefly before resuming his argument, his low voice colored with condescension. "It's not as if she would pose any threat to you. She is severely out of practice and in poor physical condition —"

"That won't last," Zuko said, with utter certainty.

"I thought that was the point?" Ozai observed in mild irritation. "Unless you don't **want** her to recover?" he insinuated, and was rewarded with a baleful look from Zuko. "Or simply don't _know_ what you want, when it comes to her." He smirked when his son's glare faltered at this, confirming his guess, and shook his head in mock reproach. "And you wonder why your efforts have proved so ineffective."

"You were _saying?_" Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose as if to ward off a looming headache.

"Set aside a space for her use, where she can practice her firebending whenever she chooses," he coolly advised. "You can turn it into a veritable Boiling Rock of defenses," Ozai added, shrugging dismissively, "station as many guards from all the nations and build as many fortifications there as you like. I doubt she'll object much, when you give her her life back."

Zuko stared at him in growing disbelief. "This is **insane**. You're _insane!_" he accused, only half in jest, grabbing hold of the bars as if feeling the need for something solid to stand against his outrageous proposal. "You honestly expect me to believe she'll start eating again if I let her bend fire? Like it hasn't occurred to her that if she dies, she'll never **bend** again? That's —"

"Crazy?" Ozai cut him off harshly. "Perhaps you've forgotten just who and what you're dealing with here. An easy enough mistake to make, when you don't see her." His eyes glinted cruelly.

The barb stung worse than it had from Ty Lee, and Zuko could not help demanding, "How do you **know** —"

"I know _you_," Ozai coldly rejoined. "And I know you're a coward."

Zuko's jaw worked as if he longed to refute it, and under any other circumstance he would.

"Though I hardly know what you expected in asking my advice," his father concluded, ignoring his offense. "I might have offered a more palatable solution, if you had come to me earlier. But you have let this situation degenerate to such a point that only drastic action will suffice."

"I might be more willing to listen," Zuko said slowly through clenched teeth, "if your argument weren't _absurd_. I can't believe that anyone's will to **bend** could be greater than their will to _live_. Even Azula's."

"What can I say?" Ozai casually replied, inclining his head. "Perhaps she lost her instinct for self-preservation along with her _sanity_. Should have thought of that before you ruined her special day, shouldn't you?"

This was one dig too many, and coupled with his dismissive attitude, Zuko could not hold back from blaming him openly. "How can you be so **callous?** It's _your_ fault she's like this!"

And Zuko wondered if he had imagined it, when what he could see of his father's face past the beard and the unruly hair seemed to tauten with his accusation. He stopped wondering when Ozai replied, "And I'm sure your mother had nothing to do with it."

"Don't you **talk** about her!" Zuko shouted, gripping the bars so tightly they glowed dully red from his hands heating them.

"But I thought she was all you ever wanted to talk about," was his father's retort, though the subject did not seem to amuse him as it previously had. "If you had any idea how many times Azula had to turn to _me_ for comfort, over some neglect or cruelty your mother had inflicted, over something Ursa said, behind her back or even to her face, you might not be so quick to defend her."

"You're lying," Zuko whispered, mismatched eyes riveted on the bearded face that might as well have been a mask, for the all the feeling it betrayed. "Mom wouldn't —" He stopped. "She loved Azula."

"No, she didn't," Ozai flatly contradicted him. "No one could."

Zuko let his hands drop from the bars when he felt the throb of a familiar pain, so old he had almost forgotten it — the same ache he used to feel when his father would berate him for his sloppy bending, or call him lucky to be born, or even just look at him in that way that said he wasn't wanted.

Because he only had to recall her tortured accusations to know that Ozai told his sister this, or something very like. And Azula believed him, because he was her father. And she might believe him for the rest of her life. Though Agni knew how long that would be…

"Mom tried to reach her," Zuko maintained, though a vague doubt lingered half-formed in the back of his mind. "It's not her fault Azula was —" He stopped at the self-satisfied smirk that appeared on his father's face, which seemed to say Zuko was proving his point for him.

"She was just as much a mother to Azula, as to _me_," he insisted with growing heat, not knowing why he suddenly felt to the need to contest her claim of months ago. "And if Azula didn't see it, that's just because —" he faltered.

"There was something wrong with her?" Ozai supplied, and Zuko glared at him, even though they both knew he was thinking it.

"As long as you look no further than the predictable answer, you will never understand her," his father dismissed him, and his arguments, as if it were not Ozai sitting on the wrong side of the bars. "And once again, you fail to grasp that this isn't about you. It doesn't matter what you believe. It was real enough to her."

Azula knelt, bound, in a smaller cell than this. Her eyes were bright with tears, fixed on a mother only she could see. _You _never_ loved me!_

"Though in the end, I suppose I owe Ursa some thanks," his father was saying with hands still clasped serenely, clearly not troubled by similar recollections. "Every time she rejected Azula, it only brought her closer to me." And Zuko blinked once in surprise at his bald admission, feeling distinctly as if he'd missed something.

"I doubt she would have proved half so devoted," Ozai mused aloud, his canny gaze leveled at his son, "if her mother hadn't abandoned her long before she ever left."

And Zuko recalled where he'd heard this before… _She only had time for her favorite, before she abandoned us both_.

_She didn't want me_.

And it began to occur to him where **Azula** heard it, who had told her these lies about their mother. About _him_. His eyes widened with the shock of realization. "You deliberately turned her against —" Zuko stopped when the rage choked his voice.

"What choice did I have?" Ozai didn't bother to deny it, coolly unrepentant. "Let her mother corrupt her with pacifist beliefs, that worthless tripe about _respect_ for the lives of lesser people? I knew where Ursa came from, after all," he added contemptuously. "To sacrifice a talent and ambition like Azula's to her backward thinking, well," he looked hard at Zuko, as if reminding himself of an important lesson, "that would have been the _real_ crime."

Zuko was deterred for a moment by sheer incredulity. Even now, it still amazed him how completely Ozai had convinced himself of the rightness of his actions. "You're a monster," he said at length, and his father only laughed once, harshly.

It was like a spark to tinder, and Zuko exploded, "You deserve to **rot** in this cell for the rest of your _life_ for what you did our family alone! And if I accomplish nothing else as Fire Lord," he gravely declared, stepping close to the bars to take hold of them again, "I'm going make certain you do."

"You may well accomplish nothing else as Fire Lord, if this is the same resolve you bring to every crisis," his father replied, with all Azula's poison and none of her honeyed tones. He laid his hands on his knees and lifted his bearded chin, as if about to pass judgment from his throne seat.

"You got what you came here for. You know what you have to do, if you are not too **weak** to use the means at your disposal. The only obstacle now, is deciding what _you_ want. What of it, boy?" Ozai demanded, with the abruptness Zuko had come to associate with his frequent and usually humiliating tests. His stomach clenched reflexively. "Do you want your sister to die?"

"NO! No…" Zuko said desperately, his hands on the bars growing slick with a cold sweat.

"Then how much more of **my** time and hers will you _waste?_" Ozai snarled in sudden impatience, with an angry gesture that just eight months ago, would have produced a searing flame. "You said yourself she doesn't have much time."

Zuko tensed as if stung, and turned from his father with a muttered exclamation of "No!" to pace the length of the bars that divided the room. "I will **not** be dictated to! I am the Fire Lord, and _you_ —" he seethed, turning on him. "You have **no right** to ask this of me! You have even less right than _her!_

"She **lies** to me, torments me every chance she gets, and now, _I'm_ supposed to help her?" He barked out a bitter laugh. "She delights in my every failure, when she doesn't actively **undermine** me, and you expect me to give her that chance _again?_ She tried to **kill** me, did you know that?" he demanded, almost as an afterthought. "Said she was going to _celebrate_ becoming an only child!"

Had he noticed his father's lack of reaction, Zuko might have guessed that he knew this … perhaps even sanctioned it. But her wrongs were all that he could see, and it was easier to say these things in front of Ozai. He reminded Zuko of every reason he had ever had to resent Azula, every bad turn he'd blamed her for. They even had the same infuriating smirk.

"I don't **like** that she went crazy," he said harshly, gritting his teeth against all the things Ozai seemed to think he knew about him. "But I didn't —" Zuko couldn't stop the catch in his voice, "I didn't do this to her. No one _made_ her choose you," he bitterly concluded.

"And if you think I'm going to take responsibility for it, for _her_, like this —" He stopped, and looked down in growing frustration at his inability to express this in a way that convinced even himself. "I won't put her best weapon back in her hands," he said at last and clenched his own, eyes narrowed darkly when he turned them on his father, "I won't give her the means to _destroy_ me! I'm not a fool."

"No, you're just a murderer."

The righteous anger slipped from Zuko's face, and he felt distinctly as if a gap had opened in the earth beneath him, when his stomach seemed to jump somewhere in the vicinity of his chest. He had no way of knowing it, but Zuko wore much the same aspect Azula had, the first time she looked into a mirror and saw her mother in the glass.

"There is more than just her comfort and happiness at stake here, Zuko," his father said, with a quiet unusual to him. "This is her life. And by some caprice of fate, it falls to your disposal. Will you be the one to end it?"

The silence stretched between them until the very air seemed to crackle with it.

"You ended it a long time ago. You ended her life the moment you chose her," Zuko finally contradicted him quietly, almost sadly. He didn't heed the ugly look that gripped his father's face, when he continued, "You pretend to understand her, then how did you let this happen? If you knew her so well, why did you keep pushing her? We were your _family_," Zuko reproached him, as if answering his own question, "and all you ever saw was a means to an end.

"The truth is, you're probably the **last** person I should be asking how to help her. But then," his mouth twisted with the bitter irony of it, "I guess you _were_. I don't know why I came here. I don't know why I thought —" Zuko said almost to himself. He cast a last, resentful glance at his father, before turning to leave. "I knew this would be a waste of my time."

"Did you?" Ozai hurled at his retreating back, not fully able to hide the urgency in his tone as he scrambled to his feet. "And how well do you think you'll _sleep_, with her blood on your hands?" Zuko stopped, but didn't turn around. It was enough for his father, who resumed with his usual confidence, "I don't even believe in ghosts, and I **know** she'll haunt you."

_She already does_, Zuko thought, squeezing his eyes shut as if to deny it.

"My advice is simpler than you might think," Ozai addressed the back of his head, his form swallowed by the shadow Zuko cast behind him. "Give her a choice, a _real_ choice, and see if she doesn't surprise you."

_That's what I'm afraid of_.

Zuko bowed his head, and grimaced as if in physical pain. Despite ruling a nation, he yet felt that he had not made a decision of this magnitude since he stood between his uncle and Azula in the crystal catacombs of Old Ba Sing Se. Zuko prayed that he chose rightly this time. If it was ever right to choose her.

"Very well," he said at last, so quietly that he could not be sure if his father even heard him, and left the cell without a backward glance.

He didn't see Ozai smile behind him.

_Have you found her?_

A gust blew Zuko's loose hair into his eyes, and he thought that with this strong wind at his back, his hot air balloon might make Ember Island in less than half an hour. It was not as quick as flying on Appa, which would actually have been an option with Aang in the capital — he frowned at a belated twinge of guilt for his rude reception earlier — but acting on impulse did not allow for such considerations.

The messenger hawk he'd sent from the capital prison had just vanished over the western lip of the caldera, when Zuko decided to follow it. The prison staff had expressed some surprise when he asked them to equip a balloon for him, but if there was one benefit of dressing in the full regalia of his office, it was quick results. Five minutes later, he was in the air and on his way to see his sister.

No sooner had he sent the letter advising she should resume her firebending, than it occurred to Zuko this was news he should deliver in person. And really, he had stayed away for far too long.

If he was honest with himself, he had to admit he was scared at the prospect of finding her so changed. It was bad enough hearing about it from Ty Lee. Zuko was not sure he could bear to witness her deterioration firsthand. But the rational part of him, a part that usually remained distressingly silent on the subject of Azula, knew that even if his father's advice was sound, it might still be too late for her. For them to have anything more than … goodbye.

He gripped the edge of the basket hard, and glared down at the waters of the Mo Ce Sea, sparkling in the midday sun as they passed beneath him, when he felt a prickling at the back of his eyes. Just as abruptly, something suspiciously like a grin tugged at the edges of his mouth. For the farther Zuko got from the prison, and his father, the more hope rose within him. Maybe this would work, maybe — maybe she'd even be happy to see him. When he brought news like this…

Zuko had shed his crown and topknot early in the flight, but there was nothing be done for his Fire Lord robes and mantle, as he had not brought a change of clothes. And anyway, he sometimes thought, reflecting back on his sole visit to Azula, that perhaps it had not been helpful to appear in such casual attire. That maybe she thought he was disrespecting his station by dressing like a commoner … or coddling her, which she would have found infinitely more insulting.

Maybe he didn't know her as well as he thought he did.

After what seemed too short a time, he landed his balloon at the small skyport on the western coast of Ember Island, and one palanquin ride later, stood outside the dark wood double doors that served as the main entrance to the asylum.

Zuko normally eschewed such formalities, but had been surprised to discover that the skyport even had palanquins on hand — and a staff of mechanics and maintenance workers who could double on virtually no notice as very presentable palanquin bearers — having never arrived by air here before. Apparently, only the nobility and visiting dignitaries patronized the skyport, and if they travelled light, often found it convenient to rent these services. This suited Zuko's purpose well enough, as even the carefree tourists who crowded Ember Island's streets and beaches in the temperate weather tended to make way for something as large and conspicuous as a palanquin.

Hesitating before the sweeping expanse of the building's southern facade, the elegant curves of its red-tiled roof and deceptive glint of sunlight off its many windows, Zuko recalled the history of this place. The asylum was stationed in the old governor's mansion, from a time decades previous when Ember Island had actually _had_ a governor. The last such official had left his office when the Hundred Years' War, then new, had caused his island's tourist industry to go bust … and left him crippled with debt from the recent construction of his sprawling estate. He had ceded this to the royal family to avoid prison, and the house and grounds sat idle and abandoned until Fire Lord Sozin, in one of many eccentric edicts to come out of the last years of his reign, ordered the foundation of a hospital here, for treating "diseases of the mind."

It became the first of what were still only a handful of such facilities in the world, rehabilitating patients who suffered from substance abuse, the effects of traumatic head injuries … and insanity. The luxurious rooms had been partitioned and refurnished to meet the needs of a new brand of occupants. The cell where Azula spent most of her time, for instance, had been padded — floor, walls, and even ceiling — and stripped of any furniture or implements she might use to harm herself.

Zuko had learned the first and only time he visited, that Azula's cell and antechamber were situated in what used to be a safe room. The irony of it might have made him laugh, if he had not found it hard to breathe at the time. There was nowhere that was safe for her, that much was becoming readily apparent.

He cast a last look behind him at the manicured grounds, with their neat pools and gravel paths, vibrant flowerbeds and elaborately carved shrubbery and trees placed at strategic intervals — and pushed gently on one of the doors to enter the reception area for visitors to the asylum, converted from the light-flooded atrium of the home. He was told patients were brought in by another way.

"Fire Lord! This is an unexpected honor!" exclaimed a white-smocked woman of generous proportions, standing behind the counter topped with black marble that ran the length of the left side of the room. He tried not to wince when she bowed at the waist, her hands held fist-to-palm, because the counter prevented her from kowtowing like the visitor she had been speaking to insisted on doing. Zuko knew too well why his visit might be "unexpected."

"You are here to see Princess Azula?" the lady receptionist prompted after a moment, peering up at him from her low bow. Her large topknot bobbed precariously when she moved her head.

"Yes," he shortly replied, and realizing he had not released them from the obligations of deference yet, added, "You may rise."

The blocky, plainly dressed man who kowtowed to him climbed to his feet in front of the counter, and gazed on Zuko with small, piggish eyes that nevertheless seemed to bug out of his head from the novelty of being in the presence of royalty. Zuko wished he would look anywhere but at him.

"Would you like me to escort you?" the receptionist offered, unfurling a scroll attached to one of several clipboards that littered the plainer stretch of counter behind the marble top. "It seems that Dr. Kwan is already with her."

"What? Why?" Zuko demanded, with the harshness of sudden worry.

"We … received your letter," the receptionist replied, and appeared nonplussed by the intensity of his gaze. "It says here when the princess was informed, she demanded her immediate to right to bend fire. Dr. Kwan wished to observe her progress."

"She did?" Zuko asked almost hopefully, a small but irrepressible smile breaking over his scarred face. There was a time when Azula taking immediate advantage of a situation would have irritated him, but he supposed he was desperate enough by this point to view it as the first sign of her recovery.

The receptionist only said, "Follow me." She rang a bell on the countertop to summon another receptionist for the man left waiting there, who opened his mouth as if to speak but could utter nothing more than a tiny squeak, and moved out from behind the counter to lead Zuko into the interior of the facility.

"As you know, the princess has been in poor health recently," the receptionist said quietly to fill the silence, as they moved down wide halls, softly lit by sconces on the walls, interspersed with the occasional mirror, tapestry, or painting. The only things to indicate this was not an ordinary mansion were the lack of any other furnishings besides the occasional wheeled supply cart, and encounters with orderlies in their plain, khaki-colored tunics, sometimes escorting patients.

"Dr. Kwan and her friend tried to convince the princess to wait," the woman informed him, consulting the notes on her chart as they turned right down another hall, "but she was adamant she would resume her training. She was taken to a courtyard along this corridor that seemed suitable to the purpose …" the receptionist added, leisurely unfurling more of the scroll, while Zuko fought his impatience to simply walk ahead of her. He could see sunlight filtering through the paper panels of what was probably the entrance to the courtyard, "… with nothing flammable, just gravel, stone benches, a fountain — and of course, no other access to the rest of the facility."

She looked over her shoulder at him for the first time in a few minutes, as if sensing his haste, and added in a clipped tone as they walked, "You will, of course, have to make some more permanent arrangement with the facility, if her bending becomes a daily occurrence. But for today, you should not expect much from —"

"**Nooo-ah-oh!**" a despairing cry from the courtyard stopped them short in their tracks. And Zuko's blood ran cold.

He knew that voice.

"Please excuse me," the receptionist said tightly, shoving the clipboard and scroll into his hands before running for the sliding doors a few yards down the hall and throwing them open. She was quickly followed outside by a male orderly from the opposite end of the hall. Zuko barely noticed when he dropped the clipboard, having apparently lost his fine motor control along with the last shreds of his optimism.

His sister's frantic protests reached him from the courtyard, "He said — he wouldn't **take** —"

"Azula —" Ty Lee tried to interrupt her.

"How could — I _believe_ him?" she half-gasped, apparently having trouble breathing properly, let alone speaking. "How could — I not **feel** it? Everything I am …"

"Azula! He didn't —"

"Liar — you LIAR! _Don't pretend!_" Azula lashed out at her, and even in the midst of his confusion, Zuko could hardly believe he'd recognized her voice before. It rasped harshly even when she yelled, and when she slurred her words. She did not even _sound_ like herself anymore.

"You said — you were my **friend!**" Azula accused he was guessing Ty Lee, and Zuko did not need to see her to know she was crying, could hear it in that false mockery of her voice. "And you _left me_ — you left me alone — you let him take — just like Father…" This last said so softly, Zuko could barely hear it. Though he heard all too clearly how her voice broke on the word "Father."

And much too late, he realized. She couldn't bend. She thought Aang had taken her bending. She had lost her last foothold on reality, and now there was nowhere left to go, but down.

* * *

**A/N: I originally intended to cover more ground with this chapter, but when I realized it was pushing 10K, I thought I'd break it up into two. Unfortunately, this means another downer ending for you — but really, what else did you expect, with Zuko's POV? Next chapter starts with a flashback, so expect some italics coming your way.**

**To address some questions from the reviews: These first three (now four) chapters are primarily flashbacks meant to fill the readers in on what has happened in the four years since Sozin's Comet. Zuko is standing outside the party (four years post-SC in the "present" of the story) recalling all this when the empty courtyard brings Azula to his mind.**

**There are hints throughout the flashbacks that should help you place yourself in time, but I suppose it wouldn't hurt to be explicit, at least in the Author's Notes. Zuko's first (and only real) visit to Azula in the asylum took place a few weeks after their Agni Kai. The entire events of Chapter 2, aside from Zuko's present-day reflections in the first four paragraphs, happened about eight months after Sozin's Comet. (Mai is referred to as Zuko's fiancee because it seems more likely to me that they would be engaged at the ages of 16 and 17, respectively, than married.) Likewise Chapter 3, which follows almost immediately afterward, and Chapter 4, which will begin with a flashback within a flashback (getting ambitious, aren't I?) and eventually segue to the present of the storyline with the conclusion of this plot point.**

**Regarding characters' reactions to Azula, I would argue that a lot of it has to do with the sheer horror of what has happened to her, and that the other characters in question (especially Ty Lee) would view it with at least some degree of compassion. Even Ty Lee acknowledges that Azula was a bad friend, when she gets angry at Azula's "justification" for attacking Mai and leaving Zuko to die when the guards cut the line at Boiling Rock. Likewise when she recalls Azula imprisoning her and Mai, and wonders if Azula would ever have released them, let alone visited like Ty Lee is doing for her.**

**But she decides what Azula would have done doesn't matter, because that is who Azula is, not who Ty Lee is. Ty Lee is a good friend, who is there for her friends when they need her ... regardless of whether of they deserve it or not. Not that she would necessarily think of it in these terms; being Ty Lee, I think she would believe everyone deserves love and forgiveness, and a second chance. (And maybe a third, and a fourth...) Ty Lee is a very forgiving sort, as we've seen.**

**Zuko is more complicated. The conflicted feelings he already harbored towards his sister only compounded with her psychotic break. On the one hand, she is basically the only family he has left besides Iroh, and he doesn't want her to die or spend the rest of her life in an asylum. Also, her insanity provides an explanation he is willing to accept for her actions towards him. He would much rather think his sister tried to kill him because she was crazy, than because she hated him. When, in actual fact, it was probably a little of both.**** Also, he feels like a failure for letting this happen, which is hardly the first time she's made him feel like a failure.**

**On the other hand, how is he supposed to keep blaming her when she's as broken as she is now? Feeling sorry for Azula is something of a foreign concept to him, and one he is not comfortable with. Though he would never admit it to himself or anyone else, he would probably rather hate his sister than feel sorry for her. Notice how quickly he fell back on the old resentment, when Ozai gave him the opportunity. It is still there, simmering just beneath the surface. Zuko just can't acknowledge it now without feeling guilty. Which is another emotion he doesn't want to feel towards Azula.**

**In that sense, his determination to "fix her" expresses a wish to return to a dynamic he is familiar with. For a long time, her unfeeling perfection was a standard he held himself to. He had only one mantra that we saw: "Azula always lies." She was one of the few constants in a life full of changes for him, even if she was a bad one. She was what he knew. Except when she wasn't, anymore. And without that constant, he is feeling a little lost.**

**Zuko does want to improve his relationship with Azula ... but even he does not know what that would look like. That is part of the reason he dwells on what could be construed of as kindness from her. He is trying to conceive of it, but isn't quite there yet. Only time will tell if he succeeds in this.**

**Finally, Iroh is ... interesting. With his comment that Azula was "crazy, and she needs to go down," he almost seemed to anticipate her descent into madness. But I don't think even he realized the depth of her pain when he said that, or he would not have written her off as he did. Being a first born like Zuko, he has a strong sense of responsibility, especially when it comes to his family. I think her collapse would have come as a shock to him, and might have prompted him to wonder if he neglected her unfairly.**

**Yes, she was hurtful to him, but so was Zuko, whom he stuck with through insults, ingratitude, and even betrayal. He was a constant support to Zuko, but Azula had no such person in her life. I think Iroh would be perceptive enough to realize this, especially when it became apparent what that lack of support had wrought in her. That is part of the reason why he visited her in the asylum. As to why he stopped ... we'll learn more about that later. I am definitely not done on the subject of Azula and Iroh.**

**I hope that answers some questions regarding the motivations of these characters, and I'd be happy to discuss the matter further with any reader via PM. Or you can leave a review. I hope you enjoyed this latest installment, and I'll get back to you with the conclusion of our (future)past as soon as I can. :)**


	4. Found

_The Fire Prince woke to the rustling of paper._

_He raised a heavy hand to his face, joints screaming in protest at the movement, and felt something soft and yielding there. Without thinking, he tugged at the cloth. A book snapped shut off to his right._

_"Don't play with it, dumdum. It's there for a reason," a familiar voice reproved him. His scalp prickled oddly._

_"Azula?" he tried to say, but all that came out was "_Ughn-ah?_"_

_"You know, it's stimulating conversation like this that I think I'll miss the most," she sighed insincerely. _

_Zuko blinked a bleary eye in the soft lamplight. He was not sure what had happened to the other one, or what she was talking about,_ _but knowing Azula, he would find out when she wanted him to, and no sooner. _

_She sat up from where she'd been reclining to his right, in what Zuko now realized was the palace infirmary, and laid the leather bound book she was reading on the elegantly carved end table between their beds. This also held a tall glass lamp, a few jars and bottles containing unidentified substances, and two white rags, neatly folded atop one another._

_"What — happened?" he finally managed, turning his head to look directly at her as she swung her feet off the side of the bed to sit facing him. He silently wondered that his neck did not creak like an old iron door with rusty hinges when he moved it. He felt as if it should._

_His eleven year old sister arched an elegant brow. She had started wearing makeup a few months ago. It bothered him for some reason he could not quite pin down. "Speak out of turn lately?" she said at last._

_And Zuko remembered… Kneeling before his father. The arena around him blurring with tears. His desperate apologies. A hand wreathed in flame, reaching for him_._ And a pain so blinding that in that moment, the world was simply gone —_

_Zuko sat bolt upright in the narrow bed, the covers falling away from his bare torso, and uttered a sharp gasp, like waking from a nightmare. His clawed hands scrabbled at the bandage that covered the left half of his face, as if he would tear it off —_

_Nimble fingers closed around his wrists. "Stop it!" Azula hissed disdainfully, her grip surprisingly strong when she tugged his hands away. "You'll just make the scarring worse."_

_And the young prince froze, as the reality hit him with a force that took his breath away. That this was not a nightmare. This was his life now._

_His uncovered eye fixed desperately on his sister. "How bad is it?" he choked out._

_Azula hesitated where she stood beside his bed, her brown-gold eyes narrowed as she watched him. And resentment flared in Zuko like a dying fire in a sudden draft. When had she ever shown mercy before?_

_"How _bad_ is it?!" he demanded with growing heat, throwing off her hands._

_"I haven't seen it up close," his sister snapped, as if he were being ridiculous. "I wasn't here when the healers bandaged you. But they told me how to change your dressings."_

_It was as close as she would come to offering, and Zuko nodded once, slowly. If there were no healers here, it was because Azula didn't want them here. And asking would do him no good._

_He watched her with no little suspicion, fidgeting slightly when she stepped closer and reached for the gauze that wrapped around his head, unwinding it with the fine concentration that made her such a natural in their calligraphy classes. Just like in everything else._

_Azula bit her lip when she got to the thick layer of bandages closest to his skin, and he felt her fingers work around the edges, looking for an opening. He was already breathing hard, and she did not even draw attention to it, now Zuko tensed in anticipation of the pain. He could think of no one more fitting to reopen a wound._

_But his sister peeled the bandage away slowly, with a care he thought of as so unlike her that for the first time in living memory, she almost reminded him of —_

_No. He couldn't think of what else he'd lost. Not today._

_Azula drew a sharp breath, but gave no other reaction than, "It's going to scar." She lowered the bandage, studying his burn with almost clinical interest. "And your eyebrow will probably never grow back."_

_Zuko blinked once, hard, and then again. Something was wrong, or at least, something besides the fact that he still couldn't see out of his left eye. "I can't — I can't feel anything," he admitted at last, his shoulders slumping a little, as if in disappointment._

_"Nerve damage?" Azula volunteered, in the disinterested tone she often adopted while studying her nails. Her hands full this time, she instead turned abruptly to drop the used gauze and bandages into a wrought iron waste bin at the end of Zuko's bed, and then crossed the room to a massive ash wood cabinet set against the paneled wall. _

_She paused in gripping the gold door handles to eye him over her left shoulder. "Though the healers say you should regain your _sight_, once the swelling goes down."_

_Zuko didn't reply, too busy studying his reflection in the panes of a window that looked out on a darkened courtyard to his right. He could not make out much of the burn except for a dark, irregularly shaped patch of skin … but the gleam of light off his newly bald scalp was fairly unmistakable._

_"_They shaved my head?!_" he practically yelped, feeling quickly over the crown of it to confirm this._

_"Well, someone's vainer than I ever guessed," Azula observed, opening the cabinet to take fresh dressings down from the shelves, "if he's worried about his hair at a time like this." She snapped the doors closed with her free hand._

_"Like you wouldn't be upset if you woke up _bald_, Azula?" Zuko said mutinously, dropping his hands with half a glare for her when she crossed to the left side of his bed._

_"I'm a _girl_, dumdum, it's not the same thing. And look on the bright side," she added with a characteristic smirk, and sat facing him on the edge of the bed, dropping an armful of bandages on the covers, "at least they let you keep your ponytail." She gave it a tug as if for good measure, and Zuko angrily slapped her hand away._

_"Uncle __**says**__ it's called a phoenix tail!" he bristled._

_"Yes, because clearly he's an expert on hair." She snorted lightly at the private joke, before adding, "Pass me the rubbing alcohol and a rag." Zuko blinked, and she sighed, "Clear bottle, Zuzu."_

_Scowling at the nickname, he handed her what she asked, and watched as she uncorked the bottle and held the rag over its mouth, upending it several times to soak the fabric, before she pressed it to his left temple. He hissed and flinched at the stinging pinpricks that erupted to life in his raw, charred skin, but Azula didn't pause in her work or even remark it, her gaze fixed on his burn and the eye that was swollen shut._

_So he settled instead into watching her, confining his expressions of pain to the occasional grimace. The angles of her face had grown very gradually harsher in the last few years. He thought she looked more like their dad every day. But the warm light shining through the painted glass softened her features, and Zuko remembered how people would sometimes say that he and his sister looked alike. He thought they wouldn't say that, anymore._

_"Azula?" he ventured at last, when she finished cleaning his wound and corked the short glass bottle, handing it back to him along with the rag._

_"What?" she replied, an edge to her tone. _

_He paused in replacing the items on the end table, the burned side of his face turned toward Azula, so he couldn't see her. "Why did Father do this?"_

_"He says you showed shameful weakness by refusing to fight," his sister replied, as readily as if she were supplying an answer to their history tutor._

_Zuko's head snapped around to look at her in disbelief. "To fight _him?_ Our _father?_" he asked incredulously. When she just tilted her head to look sidelong at him, he further demanded, "Well, what would _you_ have done?"_

_"What he commanded," Azula said seriously, and seeing him about to object, headed Zuko off, "You seem to forget that he's not just our father. He is the Fire Lord. Fire Lord _first_, Father second." She raised first one finger then another to count off. _

_"And the __**last**__ thing you should have done was _beg_," she reminded him, a slight crease forming between her brows when they drew together in disapproval, just the way their father's did whenever he looked at Zuko. "The only people who _ask_ for mercy, are those too weak to deserve it." _

_What was this then? he wondered, glaring at the gauze and bandages lying on the crisp white sheets. Some subtle form of torture? Azula smiled grimly, as if guessing the train of his thoughts. "You didn't ask," she clarified unhelpfully, and Zuko blinked. Then, "The white salve."_

_She uncorked this when Zuko handed it to her, and skimmed some off the bottom of the cork with her index finger, then swirled the same two fingers she used for her bending around in the jar, and began to spread a thin layer evenly across his burn. And Zuko mulled over her words, while the salve dulled any leftover sting._

_"I wasn't _begging_," he insisted sullenly, watching her spread the salve out of the corner of his eye. "I mean — he's our father, it would have been _wrong_ to fight him." One of her brows twitched irritably. "I didn't want to —"_

_Her hand jerked at this, and Zuko drew back with a start of surprise, when she got some of the cold salve on his nose. "You didn't _want?_" she echoed, while he wiped the salve off his nose. "You haven't earned the _right_ to want. You haven't earned the right to an opinion." Azula spoke sharply, and he stopped at the harshness of her tone. "That was your mistake in speaking out at the council. You had not proven yourself sufficiently for that privilege."_

_"But what was I supposed to do?" Zuko hotly protested, his hands balling into fists atop the sheets. "Let that stupid general sacrifice an entire division of our nation's troops?" He didn't ask how Azula knew about any of this. She'd probably been hiding behind the curtains the entire time._

_"Zuko," she chided him almost gently, sounding for a moment so much like their mother that he unclenched his fists unconsciously, "do you even _know_ Dad would have approved his plan?"_

_And Zuko's undamaged eye widened in horror, when he realized the magnitude of his mistake. He had spoken before their father — indicating he did not trust Father's judgment. In front of his entire war council. He groaned and fell back against the iron headboard of his bed, while Azula smirked at him, and shook her head once, pityingly._

_"You're _so_ dramatic," she sighed, scooping more salve from the jar and leaning forward to resume her application. "It's always now or never with you. Did it even occur to you to approach him after the meeting, when he wouldn't lose face for your disagreement?"_

_Zuko scowled, sitting up straight again when she withdrew her hand. "_Okay_, Azula, I __**get**__ it!" he grumbled, when she replaced the cork, having thoroughly coated his burn. "I screwed up! If the only reason you're here is to _laugh_ at me," he grit out, glaring down at the sheets when she handed him back the salve, "then you can just __**leave!**__"_

_"It's not," Azula said shortly, forcing him to look up when she did not relinquish her grip on the jar, and his fingers brushed hers. "And if you could stop being jealous for a few minutes at a time, you might realize I'm trying to help you."_

_Zuko laughed unkindly at the prospect, and her expression darkened just a fraction. "You're lying," he dismissed, and Azula let go of the salve with a bitter smile._

_"If _you_ say so." _

_He set the jar on the cluttered end table, and turned back only for Azula to slap a fresh dressing none too gently on his burn. Zuko flinched at the sudden invasion of his already limited field of vision, though he didn't feel the bandage stick to the salve until she flattened the edges with careful fingers._

_She reached for the gauze and loosed some from the roll, then leaned forward to loop it around the back of his head. And Zuko froze at the unexpected proximity — for one crazy second, he thought she was going to throw her arms around his neck. Until he remembered that she hadn't hugged him, or even consented to be hugged, since before their mother…_

_Azula held the gauze stationary with a firm hand on the back of his head, while she wound the rest in successive layers around his bandage, securing it in place. Zuko looked down and away from her, not wanting to make her feel uncomfortable by staring. _

_Yeah. Her. Like she ever felt uncomfortable about anything. _

_But he was acutely aware of her silence, where he hadn't been before. Azula must have thought the same, when she abruptly remarked, "You really don't feel anything? That must be nice."_

_Zuko looked up to see something like a shadow fall over her eyes. She must have realized the strangeness of what she said, because she dodged his searching gaze, withdrawing her hands to pluck a pin from on top of the sheets. She sprang to her feet to circle behind him, and pinned the loose edge of the gauze in place. _

_And belatedly, it occurred to him ask, "Has _Father_ come to see me? Will — will he come?"_

_She did not move from behind him, but only replied, "He may be there when you leave." He felt, impossibly, one of her slender hands run up his left shoulder, coming to rest at the base of his neck. "Other than that, I can't say."_

_And Zuko twisted quickly to look at her, breaking her grip when his mind ground to a halt at the implication. "Leave? What —"_

_Her lips curved in what Zuko could only guess was amusement. "It occurred to me you might have been too insensible with pain to hear him, when Father passed judgment on you in the arena," she said softly, in the same delicate tone in which she told him their mother was gone, their grandfather dead. _

_A slow fire lit in the pit of his stomach. He hated it when she tried to act like a normal person._

_"You are banished from the Fire Nation," his sentence fell from her painted lips, "until such time as you find and capture the Avatar."_

_"The Avatar?" Zuko repeated incredulously, breaking into a cold sweat. "That isn't — you're __**lying!**__" he accused again, but even he could hear the growing desperation in his voice. "You _always_ lie!"_

_"Lies are supposed to be _plausible_, dumdum," she reminded him, registering no other reaction than a raised eyebrow and the crossing of her arms. "Even I couldn't make something like this up." _

_She tilted her head as if to study him, with a detached curiosity that was uniquely Azula. "You can ask Uncle, if you don't believe me," she added, in what passed for a generous gesture with her._

_Zuko began to find it difficult to breathe. "Why — why are you telling me this?" he choked out, tears building in his eye._

_Azula regarded him skeptically. "Would you rather I let the servants tell you? Or Uncle, with his _sad face?_" she mocked, pulling a grotesque impression of the sort of hurt aspect that Iroh indeed often wore around her._

_"YES!" he exploded, clutching the sheets in shaking hands. "Yes, Azula! Any one of them, _anyone_ but __**you!**__"_

_Azula watched him wordlessly for a moment, her expression curiously blank. But there was that shadow again, the one he only glimpsed before. "Well," she said coldly, at last, "I suppose I thought there should be _one_ person in the room who wasn't crying like a little girl when the news broke."_

_"Shut up!" Zuko shouted at her, dashing the tears from his eye with the back of his hand._

_"I will not," she rejoined, her tone as hard as the amber eyes she narrowed. "You're pathetic! You expect to be Fire Lord one day, and you can't even __**think**__ before you speak!" She unbound her arms, stalking to the footboard of his bed to lean down, gripping it. "You have all the subtlety of a Komodo Rhino in a porcelain shop, and _half_ the brains. You should be glad Father's sending you away," Azula said poisonously, lowering her head to fix him with a burning gaze. "You wouldn't last five seconds at court."_

_"I __**hate**__ you!" Zuko burst out, his voice breaking for a reason entirely different than it had been doing lately. He was crying again and too angry even to notice, he felt as if the sheets might ignite in his hands._

_"You're expecting what, _congratulations?_" his sister sneered, though the light had gone out of her eyes. "It's not exactly hard to do." She straightened, looking down on him with the disdain she wore like a second skin fixed firmly in place again._

_"You have a week until preparations are complete for your departure. Spend it sulking here, or put your time to some useful employment — you are free to choose," Azula dismissed him, and then turned herself to leave. She had not taken three steps before she paused, and slowly turned to face him again._

_Zuko glared down at the sheets still clutched in his hands, breathing hard. He could not look up at Azula, he didn't dare. He had never wanted to hurt her so much in his entire life. And the clear certainty that he _couldn't_ — because she was simply better, and beloved of their father — only made him want it more._

_"You don't like what I have to say," she stated flatly. It wasn't a question, and Zuko didn't bother to answer it. "Then prove me wrong. Believe it or not, I'd welcome the revelation you're worth the time I waste on you."_

_He lifted his gaze at this despite his resolve, to see Azula leaving the room, not even waiting for his reply. _Of course she wouldn't_. Zuko could not stop himself, and hurled at her retreating back, "You're a __**monster**__, Azula!" His sister stopped, but didn't turn around. "You always _have_ been," he added bitterly._

_She cast a sharp glance over her left shoulder at him, and swiftly replied, "At least I don't _look_ it."_

_What he'd known would happen from the moment he glanced up happened, and with an inarticulate howl of rage, Zuko snatched up the heaviest projectile he could throw at her before she gained the door. This turned out to be the book she'd left —_

_And Zuko stopped with one glimpse at the characters on the cover, missing his chance when Azula walked out. He eased the leather bound book into his lap, running his index finger over the title. _Three Generations of Searching, An Imperial History of the Hunt for the Avatar._ Slowly, a little uncertainly, he turned the pages, and began to read…_

_And kept reading well into the night. And demanded more books from the royal library when he'd thoroughly examined the first. It never occurred to him to wonder why the servants obeyed him so readily in this, when they balked at most other commands from the newly disgraced prince._

_It didn't matter. He had a purpose to fulfill, and he would return home with honor. He didn't need Azula's luck, he had his determination. He would use every resource at his disposal. _

_And it would be enough. It had to be._

Her voice pierced a deeper blackness this time than before, the kind that persisted even with his eyes wide open. "Oh no **no** NO!" it moaned, as if with awful realization. "What will — **Father** say? _What will Father say?!_"

Ty Lee wasn't even trying to talk her down anymore. Zuko thought he heard her crying quietly off to the side, while Azula's voice seemed to circle, as if she were frantically evading capture.

He wondered bitterly why they didn't just sedate her already, she could not be putting up much of a fight. And then Zuko realized that frail as she was, her handlers might be struggling to find a way to subdue her without killing her.

"I **can't** fail him — I CAN'T!" her voice rose to a shriek, as the edge of panic that colored it erupted into full blown hysteria. "I can't fail — he'll _never_ _forgive!_" she despaired.

He couldn't listen to this anymore, he couldn't —

And Zuko tried to forget how, in the days immediately after he'd been burned, no one could seem to look directly at him, not the servants, not even Uncle… How except for the court physician, whose job it was to examine Zuko's scar and talk to him about it, everyone else seemed to want to pretend it wasn't there, and pretended so hard that it was all he could think about when he wasn't alone.

How it almost made him miss Azula — _almost_ — because at least she still treated him like himself. She'd been a pain in the ass, but she'd _been there_. She was the only one who never flinched from him, and now…

He couldn't even look at her.

Zuko turned and, with leaden footsteps, made his way back down the hall. _Coward_, whispered the voice that sounded more like Azula than the dying inmate who demanded behind him, "How can — I serve him — without my **fire?**"

And he squeezed his eyes shut as if this would silence her, when he knew her voice would stay, long after she was gone. When he thought it was his punishment to hear her now and always, because he hadn't heard her until it was too late…

"I want — my fire back! I want my **fire** back! _I want my fire!_" her shrieks followed him down the elegant hall, growing fainter with distance. "I want — I **want** —" she stumbled, and he thought they must have taken her down at last."I want my _fire_ —" she wept, but her voice choked off in a strangled sob.

And Zuko just walked faster.

_Have you found her?_

"… to the question of sovereignty in the western colonies," the voice of the Earth Kingdom ambassador droned on. Zuko barely heard him from his seat on the Burning Throne, its fires banked for today. It was all he could do to keep his hands from shaking where they rested on his knees. A few nights in a row without sleep would do that to you.

Zuko knew what he was waiting for. He knew. What he didn't know, was what he would do when it came. He felt Aang look up at him with fresh concern from his seat at the opposite end of the conference table.

"Are we **boring** our eminent host?" a low voice cut through his thoughts, and the address of the Earth Kingdom ambassador to the assembled delegates.

Zuko raised tired golden eyes edged with dark circles, to see General How stand from his place at the conference table, which sported the same map of the Earth Kingdom his father had once marched over in a fit of rampant egotism. The richly dressed ambassador frowned at the interruption, but took his seat without incident.

"I think I speak for us all, Fire Lord, when I express my surprise," the bearded general continued, brown eyes narrowing beneath pinched brows when he glanced to the other representatives as if for support. "That not only did you **fail** to attend a meeting you yourself had convened, but now you compound the insult by neglecting proceedings. We have come long way to be _ignored_," he concluded darkly, to low murmurs of agreement from the many-hued representatives gathered at the table.

The young Fire Lord confined his expression of annoyance to a subdued sigh, and sat up straighter to address this for what must be the dozenth time in the last few days. "I have already apologized to this assembly for my oversight," Zuko reminded him, with more restraint than he felt was deserved. "The summit was planned months in advance, and I could not have foreseen the circumstances that called me away."

Though, Zuko chided himself, he might at least have _remembered_ when he visited his father and Azula that the opening round of meetings was scheduled for that morning. Mai had seen to it that the representatives were handsomely entertained in his absence, but she'd given him an earful when he got back. And she became even more irate when she learned the reason for his disappearance. This being Mai, "irate" mostly translated to silences more marked than usual and narrowed eyes and squared shoulders whenever he tried to get close to her, but Zuko knew her well enough by now to read the signs.

"Ah yes, your _family matter_," the general replied. Zuko regretted yet again even letting them know his absence had anything to do with his family. Given the low regard they were still held in, this had not gone over well with the representatives, and it was times like these Zuko almost wished his sister's facility with lying did not escape him. Almost.

"I cannot help but wonder, Lord Zuko, just what issue could prove so absorbing to you," the general said significantly, the gold studs on his olive tunic gleaming in the light from the torches, "when of the _three_ remaining members of your family, one is retired from public life and the other two safely ensconced in prison?"

"It's a mental health facility, _actually_," Zuko bit out, in growing irritation. And only realized his mistake when the assembled representatives exchanged worried glances in the pronounced hush that fell over the throne room. Chief Hakoda actually struck his lined forehead with the heel of his hand, and Aang became suddenly very interested in studying the map printed on the table.

"You have been to see the princess Azula," observed Chief Arnook of the Northern Water Tribe, from halfway down the table.

His tone was neutral enough, but Zuko still bristled. "She's my sister."

"She is a war criminal," General How flatly rejoined, to approving nods from several of the other representatives.

"What she **is** is not the concern of this council," Chief Hakoda spoke wearily, standing to address the table while Zuko could only sit fixed to the spot, feeling distinctly as he had in the fever-dream where the throne room crumbled around him.

This was hardly the first time he'd heard citizens of the other nations, and even his own, malign his sister. But to be blindsided by it at a time like this… "It has already been decided that the princess will remain in the care of her family, until she is competent to stand trial."

"The princess is well enough to receive visitors, but not well enough to stand trial?" said the special delegate from Ba Sing Se, who Zuko's intelligence agents revealed was not so formerly of the Dai Lee. Minus his conical hat, he looked quite unremarkable, but his words commanded an attention his nondescript appearance escaped. "Why, that is almost as convenient as the sudden onset of psychosis, at the prospect of execution for capital crimes."

Zuko leapt to his feet like a shot, gaining the advantage in height by his elevation and the triple spikes of his robes of office. And the fire that had faltered at hearing her called a war criminal ignited his veins again, begging for release. This _bastard_ dared suggest —

"She's not **faking!**" Aang cried indignantly, heading off something much ruder Zuko had been about to say … or do. He hadn't thought it through too clearly by the time the Avatar stood to his own less imposing height. "I've seen her _myself_, believe **me** if you won't believe Zuko!" he bid them, forking a thumb at the his own chest.

And Zuko felt a swell of gratitude that almost brought tears to his eye, because they had not even spoken since the confrontation in the throne room, and Aang would still defend him. And his.

"She's **sick**, she needs help, not — not punishment," the young Avatar finished, looking down at the table with a pensive frown that did not seem to belong on a face that was still in many ways a child's.

"You're saying this?" the Dai Lee agent replied, with a subtle underline of skepticism. "You, who she shot full of lightning?"

"Well —" Aang began doubtfully, only to be talked over by the master waterbender of the North, whom Zuko knew instead from his Uncle's order. Pakku.

"Look, this is all very interesting, but I just _have_ to ask," he drawled, somehow managing to appear even more bored and condescending than usual when he reached up to stroke his thready mustache. Maybe he'd been taking tips from Mai.

"Is it an unspoken rule that this Fire princess come up in every other summit we convene? I hardly see why more notice should be paid to the exploits of some girl-child, than to the more egregious crimes of lesser soldiers granted a **blanket** pardon." He here shot an icy glare at Zuko, who even after eight months of this nonsense, still could not believe how diligently these politicians turned every topic of conversation to their own concerns.

"Are you honestly _unaware_ that she brought down the walls of the Impenetrable City?" General How of their Council of Five butt in, stooping to prop hard-knuckled fists belligerently on the table.

"You with your _walls_," Pakku sighed, not even needing to roll his eyes when his voice did that for him. "You **do** realize you can rebuild them just as easily as we?" He indicated his fellow Water Tribe delegates.

"The _walls_ aren't the **point!**" the general hissed, growing red in the face.

"No, the point is, you'll never live it down," General Shinu stood to add, one of several representatives from court that Zuko had invited, merely so it might not be said he was unilaterally signing away his country's resources to foreigners. And he was regretting it more by the minute.

"What rankles _more_, General? That you were bested by the Fire Nation, or that you were bested by a fourteen year old **girl?**" The grizzled Shinu smiled mirthlessly, to a snort of derision from one of his colleagues. "She was not the most _serious_ of our offenders, only the most **successful**.

"We all know that's the _real_ reason you're demanding her head on a pike, when the Six Hundred Day Siege killed more men on both sides than her bloodless coup could ever account for. And yet, I don't hear any of you proposing that the Dragon of the West be brought from whatever obscurity he vanished to to face prosecution."

"That's enough," Zuko said forbiddingly, but the effect was somewhat lost to the renewed arguments that sprang up around the table now that all three nations had weighed in on the debate.

"I said, THAT'S ENOUGH!" the Fire Lord shouted, sweeping his hands down to ignite fire in the trough before him and draw their attention. The flare of light and heat silenced them more effectively than his shouting could, for while the latter was hardly uncommon at these summits, he usually held his flames in reserve as a sign of respect to the delegates. But if they would not even respect the purpose that called them here…

Zuko extinguished the flames with a wave of his hand. "As Chief Hakoda **already** noted," he indicated Sokka's father, who had resumed his seat beside Pakku, "_my family_ is not what we came here to discuss, and —" He stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose in mounting frustration. "Agni's blood, I can't even remember what we were talking about before…"

"Governance of the Fire Nation colonies," put in the ambassador, who had not spoken since How interrupted him.

_Oh good, he remembers_, Zuko thought scathingly, about to resume his seat when a crimson-smocked manservant approached the table from the curtained entryway, and stopped to the right of Aang, waiting patiently to be acknowledged.

"Yes?" Zuko said shortly, the weariness in his tone audible even to him.

"My Lord, you have a visitor." At the incredulous look the Fire Lord directed at him, the elderly man added hastily, "You said priority was to be given to any news from the lady Ty Lee. She has … come to call."

And Zuko's fatigue vanished in an instant, until it felt like every nerve ending in his body was electrified. This wasn't — He wasn't ready for this. He hadn't had enough time to prepare for — He didn't know what he would do, when — when she told him…

But every delegate at the table was looking to him now, and as if the force of their stares compelled him forward, he descended the steps to the black tile floor, and followed his manservant to the curtained archway. He barely registered complaints of "Just walks out on us again," and "Maybe I should host these, so I could leave whenever I wanted," as he passed, or the worried look Aang sent his way. He walked past the guards on either side of the door as if in a fog.

Emerging after his servant from the relative darkness of the throne room and into the adjoining hall, Zuko spotted Ty Lee standing to the right of the curtained archway, her hands clasped tightly and big eyes already bright with tears. It was all he could do to fight the sudden urge to run the other way, when the curtain closed behind him. Because as long as she didn't say it, it hadn't happened. Because as long as she didn't say it, he could pretend Azula was still alive, and there was still a chance for her to be something more than one more life their father ruined. For them to be something more than bitter rivals and deadly enemies…

Ty Lee didn't waste any time, but ran to him and threw her pink-clad arms around his neck, while the manservant melted discretely from the room. "Azula woke up, and asked for _water!_" the acrobat cried joyfully. And Zuko had to ask her to repeat herself.

"She's **eating** again!" Ty Lee explained, grinning hugely through her tears and drawing back without any apparent care that Zuko was too shocked to return her rib-cracking hug. Her deadly hands still gripped his shoulders, as if to brace him against the news. "She guessed she lost her fire because — I mean, I didn't even have to _tell_ her! — and she wants her bending back, so she decided to **stop!** Isn't that great?" And Ty Lee finally paused for breath.

It was all Zuko could do to nod weakly, as the same thought chased itself through his mind over and over again. _He was right_. She would not act to save her own life … but her fire instead. He didn't know whose sanity that implicated more, Azula for choosing so or Father for _understanding_ her. He remembered himself when Ty Lee let go of his shoulders, and sobered a little on taking in his expression.

"I would've come and told you sooner, but they weren't sure Azula would — would make it the first few nights, and I didn't think I should leave," she said quietly, a hint of genuine pain creeping into her sunny demeanor. And it was only now that Zuko noticed she looked pale with sleeplessness, accenting the dark circles under her eyes.

"It's hard for her, but she's really trying now, and her aura gets stronger every day!" Ty Lee brightened, wiping the tears from her cheeks. "I mean, you know how she is!" The acrobat gave a watery laugh. "When she wants something, _really_ wants something, there's **nothing** that can stand in her way!" And Zuko could hardly disagree with this, having tried — and failed — to stand in her way more than once.

"Well, **say** something, silly!" Ty Lee prompted him at last, grabbing his wrists and swinging them once side to side. "She found her _center_ again! She's going to be okay!" the acrobat practically cheered, wringing his arms.

"That's —" Zuko started, his low voice rough with emotion. He gently extricated himself from Ty Lee's grip, and tried again. "Thank you, Ty Lee," he said formally at last, managing a shaky smile. "You've been — such a good friend to her." _The only one she has_.

Her gray eyes softened a little, a change hardly discernible from her usual aspect. "You know I'm _your_ friend too, right?" she asked almost tentatively, with the sort of winning smile that made him forgive Ty Lee all those pranks she and his sister would pull. He nodded, supposing he could deny it no longer after this.

"I just want everyone to be happy!" she exclaimed, sweeping her arms wide as if to encompass all her friends, whom Zuko didn't doubt were multitude. "And healthy," Ty Lee added more quietly and let her arms fall to her sides, looking away before she raised her head to regard him. "Well, I probably better get back. I promised Azula I'd stay with her while she recovers, but I'm not totally sure she believed me, so…"

"Alright."

"Oh yeah, I almost forgot!" Ty Lee said, extracting a small scroll tied with a black ribbon from her pocket and holding it out to him. "She wrote you a letter!"

"What?" Zuko objected, recoiling from the scroll like Ty Lee had offered him a poisonous spidersnake. "Azula doesn't write letters!" _At least, not to me_.

"Well, she wrote _this_ one!" Ty Lee laughed, and then her smile fell a bit. "Her fingers kept cramping up so she couldn't hold a brush, and then her hands shook, and she messed up the characters and had to ask for more paper…" Ty Lee recalled, as if she'd forgotten for a moment that he was standing right there and didn't particularly want to hear this.

"Okay, okay," Zuko said bracingly, and took the scroll from her. "Did you … read this?" he asked almost hopefully.

Ty Lee shook her head, gazing curiously at the missive. "She said it was for you, just for you." She shrugged happily. "Be sure to tell Mai the good news, she'll be so relieved!" Ty Lee added in parting, before somersaulting from the hall.

And Zuko remembered belatedly that he had a room full of disgruntled delegates waiting for him. He slowly turned and made his way back to the throne room, where the conversations that had broken out in his absence trailed off as he approached the table. He stopped before he reached Aang, who eyed the scroll he held a little apprehensively.

Zuko felt distinctly odd, as if his fire were escaping his control, and an unaccustomed warmth spread from his core to the tips of his fingers and toes, bringing a flush to his haggard aspect and tears to his eye. He knew he must sound equally odd, when he adjourned the meeting until the following morning, and none of the representatives openly objected to this, instead muttering complaints to each other as they rose and filed out.

Aang stayed.

"Look, I know it was a long shot," the Avatar said nervously, as Hakoda left the room last with a backward glance, and the armored guards on either side of the door followed him out. The Fire Lord approached Aang at a quick stride. "But I had to do what I thought was —"

His explanation was cut off abruptly when Zuko enfolded him in a fierce hug. "You saved her life. _You saved her life_," he choked out, his tears falling freely onto Aang's robes. "Thank you."

Aang looked a little confused, but shrugged and gave a sheepish grin, when Zuko released him to run the edge of his sleeve over his streaming eye. "Well, like you said, it's what I do."

"I'm sorry I doubted you before," Zuko said hoarsely, reaching up with his free hand to squeeze Aang's shoulder as if in apology. The airbender wasn't much shorter than him now. "I was out of line."

"It's alright," Aang said kindly. "I know it's hard to think clearly, when someone you love is in danger."

Zuko blinked once in surprise, and Aang added, "I mean, she's your sister." He looked at the Fire Lord with an intentness unusual to him. "You _must_ love her, right?"

Zuko frowned, and let his hand drop from Aang's shoulder. "What are you getting at?"

"Uh, nothing," Aang said, rubbing the back of his head in evident embarrassment. "I'm just glad everything turned out okay."

"Yeah…" Zuko trailed off, glancing down at the scroll he held in his left hand.

"When Ty Lee showed up, and you came back here with that scroll," Aang admitted, speaking more freely now, "I thought for sure Azula was —" He stopped at the sharp look Zuko gave him, and barked out a nervous laugh instead. "So, who's the scroll from?"

"Azula."

"Um, _what?_"

"That was pretty much my reaction," Zuko replied, frowning at the otherwise innocuous scroll. "In our entire lives, she never once sent me a letter. Not even when we were kids. I mean, it would have been kind of pointless since we lived together, but…"

"Wow, living with _Azula_," Aang reflected with a shudder, and Zuko couldn't stop the tiny smile that broke over his scarred face at this. "And you haven't read it yet?"

"No. I thought I'd wait until, you know, I was alone…" he tried for nonchalance and failed miserably, at the realization that there was no good reason for him to keep putting it off. Thankfully, Aang didn't question it.

"Sure," the young airbender replied easily, a glint of mischief lighting his gray eyes. "Just, you know, probably have it checked for poison first. And toxic powders, or maybe concealed deadly insects."

Zuko had to look twice at him to get that he was kidding. And when he did, he couldn't stop laughing for a solid ten seconds, until fresh tears streamed down the unscarred side of his face. It was a new and wonderful awareness for him, that his friends could make jokes about his sister. That they could find her funny sometimes instead of just sad or … or horrifying.

"You — you've been spending — too much time with _Sokka!_" Zuko laughed at Aang's put-on paranoia, clutching a middle that had begun to ache with laughing too much.

"Aaand you need some sleep," Aang directed him, grabbing his shoulders to turn him about and frog-marching him from the throne room.

_Have you found her?_

It was nearly two weeks later, with all the delegates departed, that Zuko finally opened the letter.

He had named his uncle Azula's legal guardian in the interim, after taking a hard, honest look at the situation that was long overdue. Aang was right, he decided at last. He was too close to this to think clearly, to make the decisions that needed to be made for her care.

He would have taken her firebending, the one thing that, in the end, had saved her. If he'd had his way, she would have died. And it would have been his fault. When he thought how close he'd come to killing her…

He could not live with that on his conscience.

Iroh had always seen her for exactly what she was, and Zuko knew his honor was beyond question. He would make the right choices for her, and keep Zuko informed of her progress, such as it was. Iroh could correspond with the asylum through messenger hawks, and make periodic visits to observe her condition.

To Zuko's great surprise, his uncle had immediately agreed to his proposal, though he expressed misgivings. Hardly surprising, given their history, but it was the best either Zuko or Iroh could come up with.

Mai, of course, was simply glad the weekly reports and their depressing influence would stop. And that there was now an additional degree of separation between the siblings.

All the while, the scroll tied with black ribbon sat on the writing desk in Zuko's room, the cavernous chamber that had been his father's when Ozai was Fire Lord. And his grandfather's before him. Sometimes Zuko wondered if old Azulon had been murdered in this very room. He supposed he had no way of knowing, but that didn't stop it serving as yet more substance for unpleasant dreams.

Sitting on the edge of the crimson covers, clad in cutoff pants and his sleeping vest, Zuko eyed the scroll suspiciously where he'd cast it in among many other official documents that littered the desk, amendments for his review, reports from the colonies, requests for an audience with the young Fire Lord. Communications that were lower priority tended to end up here when he brought them to bed with him and fell asleep reading them, his usual nightly send-off when Mai wasn't available…

He could still pick out his sister's letter from among the others easily. He had only spent the past several nights in a row watching it while he fell asleep, wondering what she could possibly have to say to him after all this. Did she know Zuko came to the asylum, and didn't see her? Did she blame him for staying away, or for letting her almost die? The scroll could contain any number of hurtful reproaches or attempted manipulations, knowing its sender.

And Zuko chided himself. He was the one in control here, even if that was easy to forget when it came to Azula. He was the Fire Lord. It was not for _him_ to be afraid of her, or anything she might have to say.

He lurched to his feet, and quickly crossed the cool stone floor to the mahogany writing desk set against a foldable paper screen, whose panels depicted two dragons, one red and one blue, fighting viciously with teeth and claws and flames. Or maybe mating. He supposed it was hard to tell, with dragons. Oddly enough, this was his favorite article of furniture in the entire room, because it reminded him of Ran and Shaw, the dragons he met at the Sun Warriors' Temple.

Zuko plucked the missive out from among the others, untying the ribbon and casting it to the floor as he walked back to his bed. He flopped ungracefully onto his back on top of the covers, before unfurling the scroll.

"'Have you found her?'" he read slowly aloud, in disbelief. "That's _it?_"

And he sat up abruptly, turning the scroll over in his hands to check for more writing on the back, though of course, he already knew, there was none. He even held the paper up to the light of his bedside lamp to check for hidden characters, like when Uncle wrote him from prison.

The scroll remained blank as ever. That was all she wrote. A single question, and he didn't even know what — Oh. Oh, of course. And he recalled the first and only time he visited her in the asylum.

_Have you found her? I thought you would look for her, now that Father _—

The anger, however, caught him unawares. Didn't she think he would **tell her** if he found their mother after all this time? Of course she knew, she _must_ know, that Zuko continued to fail in this with all the resources of the Fire Nation at his disposal — and she would take any opportunity to remind him of it. She was just using their mother to hurt him, just like Father…

"And what did you _expect_, dumdum?" he berated himself, in the absence of Azula to do that for him. "Thanks for letting me **bend** again when I'm the _last_ person who deserves it? Let's be friends, even though I **hated** and _despised_ you all my life?"

_And then what?_ he recalled Mai asking him dryly. _She would _love _you?_

Zuko threw the scroll away from him with a snarl of frustration when he felt a familiar prickling at the back of his eyes. It rolled to a stop as he crossed his legs beneath him, and reached up hold his head in his hands, glaring darkly at the shortest letter he'd ever received. And the only one ever from his sister.

After a long moment, he ran his hands through his shoulder-length hair with a defeated sigh, and climbed out of bed again. Retrieving the ribbon and scroll from the floor, he shoved them in an empty drawer of the writing desk, and extinguished the lamps with a wave of his hand. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head, and studied the intricate metalwork of the canopy above him in the moonlight that filtered through the window screens.

Hours passed before he went to sleep.

* * *

**As you may have noticed if you read my last author's note, yes, I had to break this chapter up again. The writing kind of got away from me, and it became apparent that I was (again) going to exceed 10K words if I included everything I had planned for this chapter. And that's a sort of informal rule I'm going to hold myself to, not to go over that word count in any given chapter. For your sake, dear readers, not mine, since as you've seen, I really enjoy writing and find it kind of hard to stop. **

**It works out for the best anyway, since now we have a chapter break to make our (more-or-less) permanent return to the "present" of the storyline less jarring. And I can guarantee that will happen first thing next chapter because ... I'm about three paragraphs away from finishing the next chapter, which is what alerted me to the fact this one was getting too long. You'll probably see chapter 5 in the next few days, about a week at the longest. I just need a little more time to sit on it, and then come back to revise and correct any mistakes. Fair warning, it will be a little shorter than usual (as in, only a few thousand words) but I don't think you'll object to that, will you? Of course not! :) **

**I hope this made for enjoyable long-weekend reading, and as always, please leave a review!**


	5. From Azula

**Chapter five, as promised: The party Zuko has been standing outside of for five chapters draws to a close, and we are caught up on Azula's condition four years post-Sozin's Comet. Also, I can thankfully dispense with frame narratives, for the time being. *relief* **

**Thanks so much for your kind (and constructive!) reviews, favorites and story alerts. Writing may be its own reward, but your valued input runs a close second! :) **

**Also wanted to add a recommendation for a wonderful series of vignettes titled _Scourge_ by pretty in green. (If you're curious, you can find it in my favorites.) The scene in chapter seven between Zuko and Azula was a source of inspiration to me in writing the flashback sequence (last chapter) where Zuko woke up to his scar. If you liked that scene, you would probably enjoy _Scourge_'s too, for similar reasons. **

**Incidentally, I _have_ brought work to a party before, and don't think there's anything particularly wrong with it. (Especially if you don't want to be there.) But Katara probably would, at least to the extent she would poke fun at it. I guess Aang's carefree ways are starting to rub off on her.**

**But let's get to what you actually came to here to read, shall we?  
**

* * *

Four years from his sister's defeat, Zuko stood outside a party she wasn't invited to, and reached beneath his mantle to withdraw a slightly crumpled scroll from the interior of his robes. It had been delivered just today, and he made to open it but stopped when he caught movement at the edge of the courtyard, among the pillars that edged the grate Katara chained Azula to.

The former emerged into the moonlight that flooded the courtyard, clad in her usual faded blue pants and tunic, and climbed the stone steps to join him. She wore her hair down now, but had left off her water-skin for the occasion.

"Katara," he greeted her in surprise, still holding onto the scroll. "What are you doing out here?"

"I could ask you the same thing," she observed, sitting on the top step as an invitation for him to do the same. "Aren't you supposed to be hosting this party?"

He sat down on her right side, an arm's length away. "I interpret the term loosely," he replied, and Katara laughed.

"What's with the scroll?" she prodded him instead, gazing curiously at it with the wide, blue eyes that always showed to advantage in the moonlight. "Some law for you to sign, or proposal to read? You _would_ bring work to a party."

"It's a letter," he said shortly, looking on the scroll with narrowed eyes. Seeing she expected more, he added, "From Azula."

"Oh." She encircled her knees with dark arms, looking sidelong at him. "And you haven't read it yet?"

Zuko frowned, reminded distinctly of an earlier conversation. "I don't need to read it. I know what it says."

"Does she write you … often?" Katara asked, her hesitancy clear in her careful expression.

"Define _often_," Zuko replied, bitterness creeping into his voice despite his best intent. "Sometimes the letters are days apart, more often weeks. Once or twice, months passed before I heard from her again."

At the question clearly fighting its way through her unusual reserve, Zuko simply sighed and handed Katara the scroll.

"'Have you found her?'" she read, holding the scroll open. "Who —"

"My mother."

"And have you —"

"Obviously _not_," he tersely replied. Katara had the good grace not to call him on it. He took a deep breath. "She's sent me — nearly a hundred of these letters, and they all say the same thing."

"Have you found her?" Katara echoed, looking increasingly horrified. "That's …" she trailed off awkwardly.

"You can say it," Zuko wearily replied. "Crazy."

He did not tell Katara he had kept every one of these letters. They represented the only communication he'd had with his sister in almost four years. With the last one he received, he had taken them all from the drawer in his writing desk, and spread the letters over the covers on his massive bed to compare them.

He didn't know what he was looking for. What he found was … disturbing. He had not noticed it when he read them in isolation, but the quality of the writing varied erratically. Sometimes the characters slanted oddly, in other scrolls her calligraphy was perfect, in still others too heavy, or the characters spaced too close together…

Zuko remembered what Ty Lee said about her difficulty writing, and supposed she might have been improving gradually. He hadn't kept the letters in order, after all. Or maybe he just wanted to think his sister was improving — in any way at all.

_Ty Lee approached the overwrought Fire Lord just as he was attempting to give directions to the caterer and the captain of the palace guard at the same time. An army of servants bustled about the curtained coronation hall, preparing it for the night's festivities, setting up tables, polishing the floors, hanging banners, beating dust from the tapestries… _

_Normally Mai would handle headaches like this, but she'd been kept up the night previous, and informed Zuko that if he wanted her to look halfway presentable tonight, she would need the day to make up for lost sleep. Seeing as it was at least half his fault she was in this predicament, he could not but agree … but still desperately wished he could delegate._

_Seeing an opportunity in Ty Lee's approach, he dismissed the two with minimal courtesy to figure it out for themselves, and turned to the acrobat instead. "Ty Lee," he greeted her, with a tired smile that didn't reach his eyes. "How was your visit?" As was usual for her, he knew the acrobat had stopped at the asylum on Ember Island before coming to see them in the capital._

_"It was nice," she said matter-of-factly, but the lack of excessive cheer on her part already told Zuko something was wrong. Clad the dark green battle dress of the Kyoshi Warriors, but minus their distinctive makeup, this was still unusually sedate for her._

_"How was Azula?" he demanded, a little less solicitously. She had thankfully refrained from starving herself since losing — and regaining — her firebending, but he sometimes felt that he was just waiting for the other shoe to drop._

_"Well, you know…" Ty Lee evaded the question, then brightened. "Her hair's really grown back, it's longer than it used to be!" He recalled the orderlies had had to shave his sister's head when her hair started falling out. "I even taught her to braid it today, isn't that great?"_

_"Why?" Zuko could not help asking._

_"Um, what do you mean?"_

_"What is she going to braid her hair for?" his voice continued as if of its own volition, his eyes grown dark with an enduring bitterness. "Is she going to a party?"_

_The acrobat's smile faltered, and her big eyes grew wide with hurt. Her show of happiness came crashing down in an instant. And Zuko was ashamed, when a part of himself he probably shared with Azula registered only satisfaction. When a part of himself thought Ty Lee deserved this, for refusing to face reality._

_"That's really cruel," she said at last, in a voice that seemed too small for her. "You don't know she won't get better."_

_"After four years, and no change?"_

_"She _has_ changed —" Ty Lee insisted, taking a step toward him and withdrawing a scroll from where she'd tucked it in the green sash that cinched her waste. A familiar ritual._

_"No improvement, then," he brought her up short._

_"She wrote you a letter," Ty Lee spoke abruptly, almost angrily, and thrust it into his hands._

_Zuko merely blinked once, before pocketing the scroll with a quiet sigh. "The servants will show you to your guest quarters," he began to dismiss her, his eyes straying back to the palace staff about their business, "if you'd like time to prepare for —"_

_"Aren't you even going to __**read**__ it?" Ty Lee cut him off, spreading her black-gloved hands in question._

_Zuko's brow twitched irritably. "I don't need to read it." And he turned to leave. "I know what it says."_

_But Ty Lee was far from finished. "Who is she?" the acrobat demanded behind him, bringing Zuko to a halt. He turned back to regard her, his scarred eye narrowing to nearly a slit when the ridges of his brows drew together._

_"Azula a-asked, have you found her?" Ty Lee continued, fidgeting under his piercing gaze, though her soft features were set with an unaccustomed determination. "Found _who?_"_

_A long moment passed before Zuko trusted himself to speak. "You read her scroll," he said, his low voice trembling with barely suppressed rage. He did not know why it should anger him so, except this was the one thing that was theirs. And Ty Lee could not even respect that. "Why — why would you do that?"_

_Ty Lee didn't try to deny it, even flinching as she did at his rough tone. "She s-says, you never answer her letters."_

_"What?" Zuko flatly replied, and this was Ty Lee's cue to nod vigorously, as if to confirm that indeed, Azula said this. "And did she also tell you," he bit out, clenching his fists, "that she asks the __**same question**__ every time?" _

_He grabbed the scroll from his pocket — it crumpled in his grip — and brandished it at Ty Lee, who blanched. "Did she tell you I have a drawer full of letters that all say the _same damned thing?_" Zuko hissed, smoke actually leaking from his ears. Ty Lee looked on the verge of tears, hugging herself against his harsh words._

_"You want me to answer her?" he demanded darkly, shoving the scroll back into the interior of his robes. "Then tell her _no_, I haven't found our mother. I probably never will," he admitted, his voice hitching. "And she can stop writing me."_

_"Why don't you tell her _yourself?_" the acrobat burst out, dropping her arms to clench shaking fists. "You don't even __**see**__ her!"_

_"I don't _need_ to __**see**__ her!" Zuko shouted, first thrusting his hand at Ty Lee and then throwing it out, as if to indicate his sister. Several the servants nearest them had actually paused in their preparations to stare. "I __**know**__ what I'll find!"_

_"You _would_ say that, wouldn't you?" Ty Lee accused him tearfully. "You always thought so, even before you sent her to that place —"_

_"We're not talking about this _again_," he warned, making a cutting motion with his hand to emphasize the point._

_"She can't get better there, Zuko!" Ty Lee insisted urgently, holding out a hand to him as if offering a plea — and ignoring his groan of frustration. "And if she stays much longer, she's going to get _worse!_ Her aura's turning gray —"_

_"Yeah, spare me your _professional opinion_," he snapped, losing patience at last._

_Ty Lee bristled at his sarcasm, withdrawing her hand. "She told me _not_ to come back for her __**birthday!**__" she argued. "And I haven't missed her birthday since — She must be _depressed_, or why else would she say that?"_

_"Maybe she just finds you as _insufferable_ as __**I**__ do!" The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them, and there was no taking them back._

_Ty Lee could not look more wounded if he'd actually cut her. "W-what?" she blubbered, tears spilling from her eyes. _

_There was virtually no one left working or even pretending to work in the sunlit hall anymore after his outburst. Several of the servants who were on a first-name basis with Ty Lee — which was every servant she knew — were actually glaring at him._

_Zuko took a deep breath, and tried to salvage this. "I didn't mean —"_

_"Yes you _did_, don't pretend you __**didn't!**__" Ty Lee retorted with surprising ferocity, stamping her foot. Her brows drew down over tear-filled eyes when she crossed her arms over her padded chest, as if to better shield herself. "At least Azula's _honest_ about how she feels, and even when she was __**crazy**__ she never s-said anything like that!"_

_He ignored the irony of anyone associating the word "honest" with Azula, and tried again. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, in the tone of forced forbearance he often adopted for the most persistent of his petitioners. "It's been a long day."_

_"_It's been a long day?_" Ty Lee echoed incredulously. "A long day of _what_, ordering servants around?" She gestured to them with a wave of her gloved hand, and they remembered at last to return to their work. "How about having to see your best friend __**hurting**__ because her brother would rather pretend she _doesn't exist?_"_

_His mismatched eyes flared and his jaw clenched in anger, but he managed to hold himself back this time. "You're upset. Which is why this is the _last_ time I'll ever let you say —"_

_"She knows you don't see her," the acrobat said significantly, her eyes accusing him, her fists planted firmly on hips. "Even when she was still seeing things, she _knew_ it."_

_"Enough," Zuko said hoarsely, holding up his hand, but now he spoke not as a Fire Lord concluding debate, but as a losing duelist in an Agni Kai, asking respite. _

_How did she know he thought that? He had never told anyone but himself that it didn't matter if he saw his sister, because she would see _him_. Because between her hallucinations and occasional visits from Ty Lee, he supposed she wouldn't know she was alone…_

_"The servants will show you to your room," he said in a tone that brooked no argument, letting his hand drop. "Go there. Calm down. And we'll talk about this later."_

_"No, we won't," Ty Lee countered, a little sadly. And looking more closely at her, Zuko grasped for the first time that the very act of arguing exhausted her, not just mentally, but physically. "I'm going home."_

_"To Kyoshi Island? But won't you stay for the festival?" And he began to realize the magnitude of the line he'd crossed with her. Ty Lee never turned down a party. "Mai will be expecting you…"_

_"I'm sure you'll come up with some excuse," Ty Lee spoke more coldly than she had ever done before, though her eyes still shone with tears. "You're _good_ at that."_

_And she turned from him and walked away, her long braid hanging straight down her back._

Zuko glared down at the scroll when Katara handed it gingerly back to him, remembering the bitter fight earlier that day. He had little doubt who fed Ty Lee those arguments. It had to happen sooner or later, if she kept visiting his sister.

Azula poisoned everything she touched.

"Has she gotten any better?" Katara interrupted his thoughts. She leaned back on the step, supporting herself with her arms propped behind her.

The glance back he gave her must have conveyed his surprise, that she of all people would ask about his sister. "Aang and I just came from Omashu," she explained. When he continued to look blankly at her, she added, "It was the first place we fought Azula. Have I really never told you that?"

Zuko just shook his head, pocketing the scroll, and slumped a little forward with forearms braced against his knees.

Katara didn't seem to notice. "If you told me then how she'd end up," her gaze strayed inexorably back to the grate, lost in memory, "I wouldn't have believed you."

She rested her eyes on him as if to ask the question again, and any temptation Zuko might have felt to dismiss her concern vanished, when he saw something of his own unreasoned guilt reflected in her face. Katara was there when she broke. She understood, perhaps better even than Aang, the sheer horror of what had happened to his sister.

He turned his face away and looked out over the courtyard. As if that would make this easier to relate. "She spends her days in meditation, her nights training. Her flames are blue again — They were orange, when she first regained her ability to bend. Uncle says she can generate lightning almost as fast as our father could, now. No more slow, graceful arcs for her…" He traced them through the air in miniature, until Katara leaned forward and laid a hand on his sleeve to stop him.

"Why does she only train at night?" the waterbender asked gently, as if to steer him away from his troubled thoughts. She hardly looked pleased, but showed little surprise at this, since Zuko thought it only right to warn Aang that Azula was bending again. And as usual, anything Aang knew, so did Katara.

"It seemed safer that way." When Katara shook her head once in confusion, Zuko added, "You remember when I fought you at the North Pole?" Her rueful smile indicated she did. "Firebenders set with the sun. Between that and the heavy guard she's kept under, it seemed … an acceptable risk."

He didn't tell Katara he secretly doubted this made any difference to Azula. He had watched her training at night from childhood, and noticed no change from the prodigious skill she exhibited in daylight. It had always been like that, as if she were a sun unto herself. Like the rules he built his life around just didn't apply to her.

It wasn't fair. But nothing about his sister was.

He didn't tell Katara either, that he stipulated she could only bend at night mostly so he could pretend she hadn't won. She was in an asylum. He was the Fire Lord. Why should he have to pretend she hadn't won?

"When does she _sleep?_" Katara's practical concern intruded on his thoughts, and Zuko glanced across at her.

"When the orderlies sedate her, otherwise not," he shortly replied. He turned back to the moonlit courtyard, and looked on it with hooded eyes. "And she fights them every time. She _hates_ to be sedated. Almost as much as she hates to sleep."

Katara seemed to have no reply to this, and he didn't look for her reaction.

"She hardly speaks to anyone," he continued quietly, after the silence — broken only by the muted strains of music from inside — began to eat at him. "No one but Ty Lee, and Azula won't let her visit more often than every other month. Her doctors have practically given up on her therapy sessions. She just sits there and doesn't speak a word, and nothing they say even gets a rise out of her.

"I guess you might consider that progress," Zuko said bitterly. "When she first came there, she was so _raw_," he all but whispered, thinking back on that disastrous visit. "Like she was this wounded **beast**, and I couldn't get close enough to help her, because she would just _snap_ at me out of instinct. It was like," he struggled to describe it, in no small part because his throat began to close up with threatened tears, "like she was in this constant **pain** and always had been and just lost the _will_ or — or the ability to hide it anymore —"

He stopped when Katara rested a supporting hand in the middle of his back, the way she had when they stood in this same courtyard on a night four years ago, and watched his sister thrash against her chains. Zuko didn't look over to see the compassion that probably shone in her eyes. He hadn't cried then, and he wouldn't cry now. He wouldn't cry. He wouldn't cry. He would —

"I think she resents being there," he forced out, yet without entirely meaning to admit it. "Resents _me_ for — not seeing her. She doesn't understand, I **can't** — I can't see her that —"

"I'm sorry," Katara said softly from beside him, probably because how else did one respond to discussion of insane siblings?

"It's not your fault," Zuko dredged the words up from some distant part of him that still cared about being polite.

"It's not yours either," she reassured him, but all Zuko could think was, _Then why do I still feel this way?_

"Come on," the waterbender changed tacks and stood on the step, tugging on Zuko's elbow to spur him to his feet. "I think you forgot you have introductions to make."

Zuko rose to his feet, but furrowed his brow in confusion.

"I was visiting home the last time Aang stopped, remember?" Katara prompted him playfully. "I still haven't seen your son!"

He broke into a rare smile at the mention. "Okay, but you have to promise not to wake him if he's sleeping," Zuko warned her lightly, as they made their way back inside the coronation hall to track down their respective spouses. "He's gotten fussy since Mai started weaning him. If he keeps her up again, she'll kill me. And regencies for underage Fire Lords never turn out well, anyway…"

Katara just blinked at the joke, and Zuko guessed this must be another instance of culture-specific humor. Or maybe he hadn't improved as much at telling jokes as he might like to think. "Don't you have nannies or servants who could sit up with him?" she volunteered hesitantly, perhaps uncertain of her still limited knowledge of royal life.

"Of course, but Mai wants to be more involved than her parents were…" He slowed at the threshold and let Katara walk ahead of him, taking a last look back at the deserted courtyard. And his smile turned a little sadder, before he reentered the light and warmth of the party.


	6. Timing

**Many apologies for the delay, guys. I've had to spend most of the summer looking for a job, but have recently been offered a great position, and closer to home than I expected. So that's good news!**

**This chapter, after the background of five, initiates us into the action of the story. The latter part of it may not be as polished as I would like, but I wanted to get this out before the weekend, especially since I'm heading to the lake for my birthday, and won't have internet again until Monday. Some minor revisions may come later, but nothing in the way of plot, probably just grammar, word use... Maybe. **

**Special thanks to Meneldur, who gave me some valuable input on the first part of the chapter, and a lot to contemplate as I write. I hope you find your patience rewarded :)  
**

**Last part of this chapter gave me a lot of trouble, but then, it never is easy writing about the asylum. So much to think about, and research. Azula's plan, too, required a lot of thought on my part and proved even harder to convey in writing. I'd be curious to hear what you guys think of it.**

**But that's hardly going to happen if I keep talking away, is it? So, I'll leave you to the story. Be warned though, despite my best efforts at conciseness, this chapter exceeds 10K words. Happy reading...**

* * *

A salt-scented breeze stirred the curtains of Zuko's palanquin, as it carried him down the dirt path to the secluded and simply appointed beachside cabins that would house the royal family, and the requisite royal procession, for their stay on Ember Island. Mai traveled behind him in a smaller palanquin of her own design, which sported significantly more black than his did, and their napping son brought up the rear along with his domestic staff.

It galled Zuko to have to travel separately from them, but his head of security insisted this cut down on the danger of a single, well-placed strike taking out the Fire Lord, Fire Lady, and prince at once … and Mai agreed. So he was overruled.

Hosting the vacation homes of the most prominent members of the army, the navy, and the Fire court, Ember Island was also home to some of the most fervent loyalist sentiment in the Fire Nation. Many of those fancy houses stood empty now, their waitstaffs dismissed, in the wake of international war crimes tribunals that purged Zuko's court of members of the old guard.

And with reparations to the Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes continuing indefinitely, he could not afford to pay their replacements enough to maintain the lavish lifestyles of their predecessors. The Hundred Years War had taken countless sons of fire from their homes, but this had not been as much the case for Ember Island. And with an economy based primarily on tourism, it suffered in the wake of the recession that followed the war's end. When it became apparent the conflict would stay off Fire Nation soil, the profits of that war flowed readily to Ember Island, and not everyone was happy to see them stop.

Support for Ozai and the advantages the island enjoyed under his reign ran high here even four years later, though it remained a quiet undercurrent, and not yet a groundswell of the sort that would require more immediate attention. That was what he was here to prevent. Rumors of unrest had grown persistent enough to reach him even in the capital, and Zuko had decided it was time to take action.

Mai had decided it was time for a vacation.

So while Zuko met secretly with representatives of the island's domestic forces and his most vocal detractors, his wife and son would spend days on the beach, touring the island and frequenting the marketplace. He didn't doubt Mai would return from these excursions with fine additions to her vast collection of knives and stilettos. Mai had a keen eye for weapons, and as Fire Lady, ample opportunity to indulge her discriminating tastes.

Who knew, if she were really lucky, maybe she'd even find Sokka's still missing "space sword." Zuko recalled with amusement how the eccentric Water Tribesman had asked all his friends to keep an eye out for it.

The palanquin stopped and set down smoothly. Zuko did not wait for his servants to part the curtains, but pushed them aside and stepped out, clad in a sleeveless tunic and sandals, with only his flame headpiece to indicate his station. He descended the shallow steps to the sparse grass and surveyed the bamboo trees that shaded the wood beam and plaster cabins, suspended on shorts stilts above the dark sands, while the rest of the procession caught up to him.

The cabins were sheltered by a rock outcropping at their backs, and each sported a small, shaded porch. These were spaced just far enough apart that the Fire Lord and Lady could enjoy an adequate degree of privacy, while still keeping their guards and attendants within easy call. Though Zuko privately doubted he'd get to see much more of his wife on "vacation" than he did at home, he supposed it was a nice thought.

The servants carrying Mai's palanquin stopped beside his, and laid it gently down. They parted the curtains, dark red and diaphanous, to reveal the Fire Lady slouching in her seat, absently twirling a knife between her slim fingers. She stopped and closed it lightly in her hand, looking out on their simple accommodations with a quiet sigh, and an opacity to her expression that said she was less than pleased.

Zuko smiled when a smocked attendant rushed forward with her red parasol, sweating in the sunlight. The Fire Lord held out his hand for it, and opened the parasol when it was given to him, holding it up for his wife. And Mai stepped out of the palanquin and into its shade, adjusting the flame headpiece that, like Zuko's, indicated her station despite her common dress. A gust of wind off the open water stirred the folds of her wrap-skirt.

"_Really_, Zuko?" his wife commented dryly, crossing her arms to look disparagingly on the cabins. "You didn't have enough of roughing it when you lived in exile?"

"It was your idea to make this a vacation," Zuko reminded her in gentle amusement, stepping close so the parasol shaded them both. Attendants carrying trunks full of their belongings began to take these inside. "And you knew we had to keep a low profile."

"Yeah," she deadpanned, and a slight smile curved her lips. "Good luck with that, Subtle."

"Isn't that what I have _you_ for?" Zuko remarked, and reached up with his free hand to brush her bangs away from her forehead, placing a light kiss on her brow.

Mai gave a rather unladylike snort at his sappy behavior, but abandoned her forbidding stance to wrap an arm comfortably around his waist. She gestured with her raven head to the plump and diminutive nanny, approaching with their son. "Among other things."

Zuko handed the parasol off to her, and stepped forward to receive his son from the cheerful woman of middle years, who was dressed in an otherwise plain but bright red kimono that Mai had remarked more than once made her nauseous. "He is just waking up, my Lord. What perfect timing!" she effused, her brown eyes crinkling kindly in their folds of fat.

"I can't imagine where he gets it from," Mai interjected from behind him, and Zuko exchanged a wry glance with her, before taking the fretfully stirring fifteen month old in his arms. Zuko held his son against his right shoulder, supporting him with a hand beneath his bottom and one behind his head, and looked down to watch him wake.

The boy rubbed his face in the silk of his father's tunic, grasped at it with tiny hands, before blinking up at Zuko with the sleepy eyes that so resembled Mai's. Their color was lighter than his, almost like white gold. And he never grew tired of watching them.

It hadn't always been so. Zuko was almost afraid to hold him at first, or even look at him. In the months leading up to his arrival, Zuko wondered more than once what kind of father he would make, with Ozai as his example…

It was a good thing, Mai reassured him, that he seemed to have learned a lot more from Iroh. When the boy was born, Zuko had wanted to name him after his uncle, in tribute to the man who had been like a father to him. But the old general, visiting the palace in anticipation of his grandnephew's birth, insisted he would not let Zuko be so unoriginal in naming his firstborn son.

So Zuko took the next best option for honoring his uncle, and named the boy after Iroh's fallen son instead. Though Iroh had chided him for being only slightly more original, the bear hug he accompanied this complaint with indicated he was very touched. And Zuko considered the chance to repay his uncle in some small way well worth designating his son Prince Lu Ten II, to avoid confusing court historians.

The prince of the Fire Nation yawned widely, and rubbed his eye with one pudgy fist. His pouting mouth turned up in a smile when he saw who held him, and he reached up to grab two handfuls of Zuko's hair, hanging loose from his half-topknot.

Clad in crimson pants cinched at the knee and a long shirt with clasps too complicated for him to undo yet, Lu Ten looked innocent enough. But his parents were well acquainted with his unfortunate habit of hair-pulling, to the extent that Mai was always careful to keep her hair bound up in his presence. Zuko still forgot sometimes.

"Pu dooow!" the boy whined insistently, with a tug for emphasis. His head turned sharply down in fascination at something on the ground, and Zuko realized he had never seen sand before. The thought brought a smile to his face, despite the pain in his roots.

"You might have to let go of my hair first," the Fire Lord prompted, moving to pry it from his hand. But he bent hastily when Lu Ten leant sideways in his grasp, and Zuko nearly dropped him. He set the boy down on the sand and carefully pulled his hair free.

"You're as prickly as your mother sometimes," he chuckled lightly, descending to one knee to hug the curious prince, who bent forward to rake baby fingers through the dark sand. Zuko pressed his cheek against downy hair. "But I'll always love you."

"Love you, bye," Lu Ten echoed absently, familiar enough with this sentiment to have learned to repeat it. He tried picking up the sand, only for it to slip through his fingers.

But even those innocent words gave Zuko pause, looking down on the black-haired head bent over the sand. Was that really how Lu Ten would remember his father? As someone who was always leaving about some official business? The Fire Lord heaved a quiet sigh.

He would really have to spend more time with his family… Once he convinced his people that an honorable peace was worth sacrificing a century of ill-gotten gains. And convinced the world that his nation was sincere in making amends. And convinced _himself_ that he had the first idea what he was doing.

When he thought about it that way, Zuko supposed he should be happy Lu Ten even knew who he was. It was not as if Zuko could say much more for his relationship with _his_ father, from what little he could remember of his own early life. And yet … he had wanted more than that, for his son. He still wanted more.

"My Lord," one of his grooms prompted quietly off to his right, kneeling similarly on one knee to address him. Zuko stood to brush the sand from his baggy shorts, before turning to regard him. "We were delayed in our arrival by the traffic we encountered in the streets, and your conference begins in one hour. It might be advisable to resume your robes of office now, and leave enough time to arrive there on schedule."

"Of course," Zuko wearily replied, lifting his hand to indicate the dapper man may rise. He didn't look forward to the prospect of wearing so much clothing in this heat, but if that succeeded in getting his opponents to take him more seriously, he supposed it was worth the imposition.

He issued a curt nod to the nanny, standing a respectful distance away in the glaring sunlight, to indicate she could resume watching her young charge. And with no more ceremony than that, Zuko took his leave of the two, and followed his crimson-smocked manservant into the centermost cabin in the jumbled row.

There he found Mai already unpacking some clothes into the rough hewn armoire propped against the plaster wall to his right, and ignoring for the moment the wicker chest at the end of the warped, wood frame bed that took up a solid quarter of their floor space. He caught her in the midst of sighing quietly to herself, probably over the meagerness of their surroundings, before her eyes darted to him with a glint of mild accusation.

He couldn't help but smile a little at that.

* * *

It was the last smile Mai would see from him that day.

"… and how are we supposed to accomplish anything, when _half_ the people I invited don't show up?" Zuko complained bitterly hours later, pacing a rut in the faded oak floor.

Mai propped herself into a sitting position atop the threadbare blanket that lay over their bed, sighing quietly when his silence told her he actually expected a response. Lu Ten kept sleeping, curled up beside her.

"And this really surprises you, Zuko?" she chided him wearily, looking up to see him framed by the dying light that shone through the window panes behind him. When the sunlight caught his crown like that, it looked almost like a living flame — and Mai could almost understand why Lu Ten never tired of playing with it. Beyond the fact that Zuko didn't often allow him. "What could they possibly have to gain by showing up?"

"Only what they've been _demanding_ all this time!" he angrily rejoined, until Mai gave him a sharp look that said, _Wake the baby, and you die_. Zuko softened his tone accordingly, concluding in a harsh whisper, "They wanted a say in how this country is run, I'm **giving** them a say! Why won't they take it?"

"Come on, Zuko," she prodded him impatiently, lifting Lu Ten carefully in her bare arms, and easing her legs over the side of the bed, inviting him to sit beside her. "Even _you_ don't believe that."

And Zuko crossed the length of floor between them, to slump down beside her as if in defeat. While she settled their son comfortably into the crook of her arm, he removed the flame headpiece from his topknot and held it in his hands, looking down on it as if the hammered gold reflected his every failure. Mai decided she might need to temper her criticism.

"Not everyone's as honest as you," she reminded Zuko, with the gentleness she reserved only for him, and their son. She reached over with her free hand to hold his wrist in a reassuring grip. "Or as selfless in the service of their country."

He looked up at her touch, and let go of the crown to take the hand she offered in his own, inviting her to continue. "You know as well as I do, what those men want is the old world back. The advantages they enjoyed in the war, or something like them. And they're not going to get that from you."

"You'd think they'd stop trying, after _four years_," Zuko grumbled, in tacit agreement. His eyes fixed on the simple wood stove set against the wall opposite them, but he continued to run his thumb over the hollow of her hand, almost unconsciously.

"People have longer memories than you might think," Mai contradicted him. "Especially when they feel entitled. If they talk to you, the best they could hope for would be compromise. And however _secret_ these meetings may be," she used the word ironically, knowing better even than Zuko that nothing he did would stay secret for long, "they admit their opposition by attending.

"But so long as they can hide behind their arguments, obscure their influence, incite foolish and desperate men against you, well," she sighed in mild annoyance, "they stand to gain more, and risk nothing."

Zuko's eyes widened fractionally. He probably could not recall the last time she'd said so much at once. "You've thought a lot about this, haven't you?" he asked, his voice dropping in concern.

"My future hangs on it," Mai replied matter-of-factly. "And your future, and his." She glanced down at Lu Ten's head laid on her breast, and felt the familiar glimmer of warmth kindle in her.

"So, no pressure," Zuko muttered mutinously, and Mai raised her eyes to his with the sardonic smile that few ever got to see. "I'm just facing an entrenched opposition that can't be pleased."

She shifted Lu Ten against her shoulder when he began to stir, letting go of Zuko's hand to hold him in both arms. "All we have to do," she readily replied, glancing sidelong at him, "is make them meet you on _your_ terms."

"_We?_" Zuko echoed, clearly caught between dawning hope and incredulity.

Mai grimaced in a manner designed to say, _You caught that, did you?_ She had thought there must be something wrong with him, when Zuko told her this was her most endearing mannerism. "Why don't," she spoke slowly, in dread of what she was about to say, "I go with you to the negotiations tomorrow?"

"You would do that?" her husband asked unnecessarily. "But you hate politics."

"And I love _you_," Mai countered calmly, rubbing a practiced hand up and down Lu Ten's back. "So I guess that amounts to my usual indifference." She shrugged the shoulder nearest him as if to prove this.

"It's fine, Zuko. I knew what I was getting into when I married you." And it was true. With parents as ambitious as hers, there were few noble daughters better educated in the workings of the court.

"And you still went through with it," Zuko noted, with entirely too much self-satisfaction for his own good. His mouth took on a characteristic tilt that betrayed the beginnings of a smirk.

"I know," Mai sighed sarcastically, "sometimes I doubt my own judgment."

But instead of chuckling appreciatively like he usually would, Zuko sobered at this, glancing out the front windows at gentle waves lined red in the sunset. "What is it?" Mai flatly demanded.

"It's just —" he started reluctantly, compromising by stopping just short of looking directly at her, "when this happens, I just think that…" He closed his eyes as if to brace himself for something he knew she didn't want to hear. "Azula wouldn't have these problems."

He looked almost relieved to get this out in the open, but he shouldn't be. Because she really didn't want to hear it. The hand that rubbed her baby's back faltered and stopped at Azula's name.

"No, she'd have other problems." Mai replied, so coldly he actually winced at her tone, and his mismatched eyes questioned her. "Like thinking her waitstaff is trying to kill her. Or talking to people who aren't there."

And Zuko stiffened, his jaw clenched in obvious offense. "Too soon to joke about it?" Mai tried, and got her answer when he gripped the flame headpiece like he would crush it in his grasp. His eyes flashed when he looked on her in reproach.

And Mai sighed again, thinking he would find this — and other things — a lot less overwhelming, if he just learned to take it less seriously. "If people obeyed her, it was because they _feared_ her, not because they respected her. Is that really what you want?"

Zuko stood quickly, as if propelled to his feet by restless energy. He laid his crown atop the wicker chest, and took a few steps into the spare little room. Mai studied his profile when he half-turned to face her. "Will you honestly pretend you never had _any_ regard for her at all?" And something like an accusation lurked in his tone, even if he wouldn't look at her. "That you **hated** every minute of it?"

Mai couldn't tell if his bitterness was directed at her, himself, or something else. And couldn't bring herself to care. They'd had this argument before.

"What do you want from me?" she demanded in reply, but remained where she sat. "Okay, so she was … not boring," Mai admitted grudgingly, glaring dully at the floor. "Like no one I've known before or since. So she was everything I wasn't allowed to be. Strong, smart. Confident, in control." Mai's voice fell almost to a whisper, when she added, "_Herself_."

She rested her head against their son's soft hair, breathed his baby scent while she remembered. "And when I was with her, I got to be that too. When it suited her," Mai qualified flatly. "She put my parents in their place. And she actually had a sense of humor." _Unlike someone else I could mention_.

She lifted her narrow chin quite deliberately at this, to see Zuko standing watching her, a vulnerability to his expression that communicated all too clearly just what he expected. That now that she consented to share her feelings, they could cry together over Azula's sad, sad fate. Or some similar nonsense.

Agni, he was worse than Ty Lee sometimes.

"But that doesn't change what she did," Mai asserted, visibly dashing his hopes. "She crossed a line, when she left you to die. And subsequent events showed her for what she really was." Her eyes narrowed darkly. "Something barely human, let alone deserving of respect."

Perhaps it was because she blunted her dismissal with something approaching fond recollections, or because Zuko was still surprised by the novelty of discussing Azula openly with Mai. But he didn't get as angry he usually would, when she said things like this. He didn't get angry at all.

He just turned his face away, as if deflecting her harsh words. And with heavy footsteps, he crossed the fraying rug to the other side of their bed, lifting the triple layers of the mantle carefully from his shoulders and up over his head. He dropped these on the faded coverlet, and Mai was faintly impressed when she saw he managed to remove them without disarranging his half-topknot. "What are you doing?" she asked emotionlessly, half-turning to face Zuko where she sat opposite him.

"I keep thinking about what Ty Lee said," her husband confessed, stripping the belt that cinched his waist with its drape of crimson cloth. He reached for the high collar at his neck to undo the fastenings that lined the inside of his robe. "I think — Mai, I think I should see her."

Mai didn't have to ask who he meant. She didn't have to ask what Ty Lee said, because even if Zuko was reticent on the subject, the servants were more than willing to talk. Instead, she asked the most obvious question that presented itself to her. "Why?"

And his hands stopped momentarily. He avoided looking at her when he released the last clasp at his waist and stepped out of his robes, clad only in baggy pants and his pointed boots. "We're right here on the island," he mused darkly, letting the fabric fall from his hands and onto their bed like a sinuous river of blood. "How can I not —"

"You stayed away for three years…" Mai cut in with growing anger, her gaze fixed on the starburst scar that marked where Azula's lightning entered his body.

"She's my sister." And Zuko put an end to the discussion with the same tired axiom he always did.

Mai had had enough. She laid Lu Ten in the center of the bed beside Zuko's discarded robes of office, where he rolled onto his stomach and stuck a thumb in his mouth, before his light eyes drifted closed again. If only her husband were so easily satisfied, she reflected cynically, rising to follow him to the squat little armoire against the white plaster wall.

Zuko reached inside it to retrieve a simple, crossed collar shirt, throwing it over his shoulders. He looked back at her with some surprise when Mai stepped up behind him and folded the collar, expertly tucking it into his wide cloth belt. She wrapped her arms around his waist, her chest pressed against his back and her chin resting on his right shoulder.

"You don't owe her anything," Mai whispered in his ear. "And the sooner you realize that, the better off we'll _all_ be."

He didn't throw her off or even deny it, only bowed his head and hugged her arms against his chest. "You don't know what it's like," Zuko said at last, and his low voice faltered on the only explanation he could give, "to have someone your whole life, and then they're just gone."

And Mai closed her eyes against the pang of sympathy she never felt for anyone but Zuko and their son, wondering why he couldn't just let go. She supposed she might be more bitter about it, if it wasn't one of the things she loved him for. "You're right," she sighed, and opened her eyes. "I don't know what that feels like. I don't _ever_ want to know what that feels like." Mai felt him tense, and tried one last time, "Please Zuko. Don't do this."

And just as she knew he would, Zuko unbound her arms and turned to face her, his brow furrowed in concern, his hands gripping her elbows in reassurance. "It's perfectly safe, Mai. She's under tighter security than she would be at the Boiling Rock." He ignored Mai's snort of derision to add, "And she hasn't even tried to escape. Not once."

"If she hasn't tried to escape, it's because she doesn't _want_ to," Mai insisted, removing her arms from his grasp. "Not because she **can't**. Don't underestimate her, Zuko," she warned tonelessly, crossing her arms as she watched him turn from her to don a long, black vest lined with gold over his short-sleeved shirt. He wrapped a cloth belt twice around his waist, and tied it with a knot. "She's still dangerous. She always will be, as long as she's alive."

"I know," he admitted, his back still to her. "But she's —"

"— your sister," Mai finished for him, flatly. He turned to look at her, and the corners of his mouth twitched with something like gratitude. "I know."

Mai considered in that moment just going with him, but dismissed it almost as quickly. She had never been to see Azula, and there was no telling how the mad princess would react to her, whatever improvements Ty Lee claimed in her mental state.

And Mai knew from what Zuko had described to her of the security, that she would not be allowed to bring any of her knives or stilettos into the cell with her, for fear that Azula might get a hold of them. Mai was no slouch in hand-to-hand combat, but she knew Azula was better. And that wasn't even taking into account her firebending. Or lightningbending. If Azula ever succeeded in using her against Zuko, Mai thought she would never forgive herself. Not to mention she might perish from the shame of it — if Azula didn't kill her first.

Mai reminded herself that this was her sister-in-law. Not for the first time, she wished she married into a more normal family. And when Zuko hugged her goodbye a moment later, all she could think of to say was, "Be careful."

"Always," he confidently replied, and Mai resisted the urge to remind him of all the times he hadn't been. And then she had to resist another urge, the urge to just not let him go, when he took her chin in his callused hand and kissed her, holding the embrace a second longer than was strictly necessary.

He turned her head gently to the side, to whisper in her ear, "Kiss Lu Ten goodbye for me." And with his mouth set in a pensive frown and no more farewell than that, Zuko released her to part the brightly colored beads that hung in the archway, and walked out into the twilight.

The sun had just sunk below the horizon, when Lu Ten rolled over and sat up behind her, burbling a few nonsense words. Mai turned just in time to witness him yawn at the conclusion of a lengthy nap, and blink curiously up at her. She sighed and went to search their trunk for spark rocks, before the growing dark could hide them from her view…

Forty minutes passed, before Mai resorted to throwing knives at the wall, as much out of boredom as frustration. She doubted it would take much away from the decor. Knife marks would look right at home in a dump like this.

She supposed she might have gone out and looked for someone somewhere doing something vaguely interesting, as unlikely as that was to find on an island full of tourists, and people who made their living off tourists. But knowing where Zuko had gone left her with little other desire than to see him back here, safe. A desire best served by staying put, for the moment.

Lu Ten sat near her feet, watching the knives whiz overhead with his thumb stuck in his mouth, and his father's old, stuffed purple platypus bear clutched tightly to his side. Despite having the short attention span typical of toddlers, he always took notice when Mai practiced her aim. She supposed it might just be his infant affinity for shiny objects, but liked to think it was something more, that maybe he inherited not just her eyes and thick black hair, but her enduring love of pointy things.

The unmistakable shriek of a messenger hawk in the darkness outside broke Mai's concentration. Her next knife went wide of its mark, nearly striking the captain of the palace guard when he came rushing through the bead-hung archway, the missive clutched in his hand and all decorum forgotten in obvious haste. Fortunately, the stout man was possessed of excellent reflexes, and ducked so the knife only nicked the crest of his helmet.

Mai issued no apology, and the captain didn't ask for one. "Urgent news from Lord Zuko!" he exclaimed, with no more preamble than a clumsy descent to one knee, which looked all the more awkward for his elaborate armor. "Princess Azula has _escaped!_ She's believed to be at large on the island!"

The Fire Lady could only stare down at the triple spikes on his helmet in the warm glow of candlelight, while her son tottered behind her skirt to peek shyly out at the intruder. And Zuko's reassurance echoed in her mind. _She hasn't even tried to escape. Not once_. Of course with Azula, the first try would be the last.

"Where is my husband?" Mai demanded quietly, her voice betraying none of the ice that formed around her heart. If Azula tried to hurt him…

The captain raised his head, the open face of his helmet exposing heavy brows drawn with concern. "He requests you take the prince and a retinue of guards to the central inn. There's no reason to believe the princess knows you're here, but he thinks you'll be safer in a crowd. It's unlikely she wants to be seen —"

"You shouldn't presume to know what she wants," Mai cut across him, with narrowed eyes and an unaccustomed edge to her tone that chastened him. "What you _should_ do, is answer my question. Where is he?"

"Organizing the search, my lady," he hesitantly replied, climbing to his feet and bowing low with his hands held fist-to-palm, clearly hoping to be dismissed to more pressing duties. "But he wishes you to remain in safety —"

"Answer your Fire Lady!" Mai said stridently, taking a quick step closer to compel him and eliciting a frightened squeak from Lu Ten, who was unused to hearing his mother express herself so loudly. "_Where?_"

"The guard tower on the western bluffs," he admitted at last — and quailed visibly when Mai made for the archway, her intent clearly written on her usually impassive face. "_Please_, Lady Mai, he enclosed this message for you!" the captain entreated her, descending again to one knee and offering up the scroll he held like a tribute.

And she turned to snatch the letter from his grasp, her breath catching in her throat. She read over the characters once quickly, then again, the words settling on the surface of her mind…

_I've dispatched men to every corner of the island, and she should not escape them. But I fear how she may react if cornered. I won't feel safe for Lu Ten, unless I know you're with him. Please stay with our son. I'll join you as soon as I can_.

A letter. Unsigned, but the sloppy hand was still recognizable as his, dashed off in haste. Another _cursed_ letter, more understandable under the circumstances perhaps, but no less infuriating. The scroll tore itself in half in her white hands. Soon it lay in pieces at her feet, pieces Lu Ten eyed with the furtive gaze that said he would stick them in his mouth when she wasn't looking.

Mai strode over to the bare stretch of wall beside the archway that served as her most recent target, and began pulling knives from the cracked white plaster, and secreting them about the folds of her skirt. The unfortunate captain watched with the look of a man who knew he was going catch hell for this, until she stopped, her back still to him and her hand upon the last remaining knife.

And she leaned her forehead against the wall, her breaths as measured as her words, when she finally spoke, "He's only delegating the search? Not taking part?"

The captain's bland face slackened in obvious relief. "That is my understanding."

The Fire Lady drew a deep breath and tugged her last knife from the wall, stooping to the side to replace it in an ankle sheath. She glanced back to address him, "Come, Lu Ten. Daddy will meet us in town."

And the little prince gave a guilty start, dropping the torn fragment of scroll he was bringing to his mouth and falling abruptly on his bottom. "Dada?" he chirped hopefully up at her, with that same uncertain smile she had seen on Zuko's face too many times to count. Mai held out her hand to him, and Lu Ten climbed to all fours and stood unsteadily.

He staggered just far enough to fall into her outstretched arms, dragging his stuffed animal behind him and grinning proudly at his own progress. Mai lifted him and swiftly kissed his hair. "My little man," she whispered fondly, taking the purple platypus bear from him before he could drop it, and snatching her crimson shawl from a chair with the same hand.

Mai turned her steely gaze on the captain. "I only need his nanny." She paused, calculating. "And three plainclothes guards. Spare every other member of our retinue for this search." Seeing him about to object, she sighed and added, "You can escort us to the inn if you want, but I won't have this many people sitting idle with a madwoman on the loose." _Even if _I_ have to_.

"It will be done," he confirmed, bowing again with his hands arranged in the familiar salute. "And what of your luggage?"

Mai gave him a withering look. And she'd thought he was a man of sense. "Leave it," she tersely replied. "We'll send for anything we need, once this settles down."

"Yes, my lady." He extinguished the candles with a motion of his hand, while Mai removed the flame headpiece and pin from her hair, letting it fall freely down her back. Lu Ten didn't even make a grab for it, perhaps having absorbed some of the gravity of their situation. He only sucked his thumb intently, while his mother laid the last mark of her status inside an uneven bookshelf, and parted the beads that hung in the archway, stepping out onto the dark porch.

The Fire Lady watched her guards and servants moving busily between the cabins and over the moonlit sands, securing the cabins for their departure. And when the low wail of tsunami sirens cut through the night air, and these paused only briefly in their work, Mai knew the signal for what it was. She draped her shawl over Lu Ten's little shoulders, when he whimpered at the noise and clung tighter to her shirt.

And Mai reflected on the fitness of the metaphor. Azula as a natural disaster. With the loss of her sanity, she was no less unpredictable, no less deadly. They would none of them sleep soundly tonight.

The captain of the palace guard emerged behind her, closing and latching the shutters on either side of the archway. "Lady Mai," he prompted her respectfully, and she looked over her shoulder at him, her chin resting lightly atop Lu Ten's head. "Would you like me to give any message to your husband?"

_Damn you, Zuko_, she thought privately, though without any fire behind it. _Damn you and your whole crazy, screwed up family_.

And Mai said aloud, "You can tell him if he dies, I'm going to kill him."

* * *

Zuko later thought he should have guessed, when he arrived at the asylum to find a light in every window, and orderlies roaming the immaculate grounds in the falling dark, lanterns held aloft. They moved in groups of two and three, but with an unusual lack of direction. And those close enough to notice only stopped at his approach, but did not offer Zuko or the two imperial firebenders flanking him any welcome.

Feeling a growing weight of unease, Zuko stopped before the south-facing doors when his efforts to enter found them locked and barred, even if the warm glow of hanging lamps inside clearly shone through the windows. He withdrew from the wood doors and gave a nod to his guards, who stepped forward and began pounding on them with gauntlets that might have been designed for the purpose, loudly proclaiming, "Open, in the name of the Fire Lord!"

It took nearly a full minute of this, before one of the doors swung inward, visibly startling the guard who knocked on it, to reveal an agitated Dr. Kwan. His balding hair stood up on his head, as if he had repeatedly run his hands through it in frustration, and his gold physician's robes were rumpled.

"What is the meaning of this?" he demanded angrily, of the only guard he could see. "All personnel should report to the _service_ entrance. We're on **lockdown**, man!"

This more immediate concern stopped Zuko wondering why a doctor would answer the door, and he quickly stepped between them. "What's going on here?"

"Lord Zuko!" the doctor exclaimed, and executed a hasty bow. He stepped away from the door to allow them inside the otherwise empty foyer, though Zuko scanned the length of counter and low slung seats with wary eyes, his senses on high alert. The physician's next words did little to settle his nerves."My apologies for the breach in procedure, but we've had an escape! Several, in fact."

"_What?_" the Fire Lord demanded, immediately assuming it was his sister. He rounded on Kwan in disbelief. "How could you let this happen?"

The balding doctor held his hands up in reassurance. "Please, don't be alarmed. The princess is secure," he insisted, quickly deducing Zuko's fear. "The breakout occurred far from her cell. And she has been sedated, as an additional security measure."

"I want to see her," Zuko said flatly, unconvinced. There was no way this had nothing to do with Azula…

"Sir, visiting hours are over," Kwan argued hopelessly. "And she is in no condition to receive visitors besides. As head of this facility, I have other duties than —"

"I demand it," Zuko amended harshly, his glare making it clear that even without his five-point crown, he was due the respect owed to royalty. "And you will take me to her."

"Yes, my Lord," the physician conceded, cowed not so much by Zuko's anger perhaps, as by the combative stance his guards took up when Kwan refused him. He bowed again with one arm extended toward the interior of the facility, inviting Zuko to follow him. The doctor ducked behind the counter to grab a clipboard and scroll much like the one Zuko saw the last time he was here, and set off at a brisk pace down the halls. And the Fire Lord fell into lockstep beside him, followed closely by his armored guards.

They walked in silence for several uncomfortable seconds, the physician examining his scroll, before Zuko remarked, "I'd still like to know how this happened," in a tone that made it clear this was not so much a request as an order.

"Of course," Kwan sighed as they rounded a corner, with a resignation that told Zuko he'd had to recount these events more than once. "Five patients overwhelmed our staff and escaped through the laundry facilities, when we lost power in the cellars adjacent. We still don't know the cause, but the automatic locks and cooling systems failed."

At the Fire Lord's questioning look, he added, "We keep insulated cells for firebenders there, where they can undergo cold therapy."

"Cold therapy?" Zuko echoed, incredulous. He stopped, and the rest of the little procession stopped with him, the doctor turning back to face him. "They have coolers at the Boiling Rock!" he reminded, his ire only growing at the memory. "These are supposed to be _patients_, not **prisoners!**"

"A distinction we are careful to maintain," Kwan wearily replied, his gray eyes shadowed in the soft light of the paneled hall. "The cells are not used for punishment. And recent studies out of Ba Sing Se University indicate benefits to mentally ill firebenders prevented from bending by nonviolent means."

"But _Azula_ wasn't like that," Zuko protested, rejecting the idea with a sweep of his hand. "She nearly **died** when she was cut off from her fire!"

"That is debatable," the physician coolly rejoined, tucking the clipboard under his arm to tug his left sleeve straight. "And a moot point besides. The cold does not prevent her bending."

"_You threw her in a cooler?_" Zuko demanded, and refrained from shouting only with difficulty. "Why was I not notified?"

"Because you are not notified of any aspect of her care, per your instructions," the doctor reminded him almost impatiently. "Your uncle was told, and raised no objection." Seeing Zuko about to object to this, Kwan turned to continue down the hall, compelling him to follow.

"What you fail to understand, Fire Lord," he explained, his gaze directed straight ahead, "is that the only practical alternative for patients who cannot control their firebending, is forced sedation. And how can we address their underlying issues, when they're unconscious most of the time?"

"And was _she_ unconscious, most of the time?" the Fire Lord said darkly. They passed an elegant wheeled supply cart stocked with mortar and pestle and medicinal herbs, and Zuko wondered how many of them were sedatives.

"At one time, yes, she was." Zuko's scowl deepened, and the physician looked over his shoulder to curb his reproach. "As I told you, it's standard practice in cases like hers. And she began to show much more restraint, once she was allowed to train again. We only have to sedate her now for reasons of her health."

"To make her sleep," Zuko added, moving up beside the doctor.

Kwan nodded once in confirmation. "Still, the princess had an unfortunate habit of burning anything in sight when she felt threatened. Which evidently she did, when we were forced to sedate her."

And he headed off Zuko's next question — _she doesn't anymore?_ — by sliding open a paneled door to their right, and ushering them through. "We thought it might help her, to confront her fears without firebending to fall back on. That is one of the aims of cold therapy."

And Zuko tensed as he walked, already guessing how that had turned out. "We were … quickly disabused of the notion," Kwan sighed, unsurprisingly. He ran bent fingers through his hair, disarranging it further. "The cold had no effect on her bending. _None_. We think her fire simply burns too hot. As you are aware, she is the first bender in several generations to wield blue flames, and the first ever recorded in the royal family."

Yeah, he was aware. Their father had mentioned it often enough…

"To suppress her bending would require cold sufficient to kill her," the doctor speculated. "And that is, of course, not a theory we're willing to test. What's more, the princess suffered a complete psychotic break —"

And Zuko stopped him with a hand on his arm, the question clearly written on his face. "She began screaming, crying, throwing fire at the walls," Kwan explained tonelessly, not altering his pace in the slightest, "shouting insults and accusations, at her hallucinations, I suppose. 'Filthy peasant,' 'liar,' 'traitor,' things of that sort. Too vague to make good talking points for her sessions."

But it wasn't vague to Zuko. He thought he knew exactly what she was reliving. And that was why he wasn't surprised, not really, when Kwan concluded, "The princess eventually collapsed into what we thought might be a seizure, thrashing on the floor with her arms held behind her back. She'd melted all the ice in her cell by that time…"

Zuko let out a long, measured breath through his nose, pinched the bridge of it in frustration. Would this never stop?

"The only explanation she would offer afterward," Kwan continued thoughtfully, "was that she hated the cold. We tried the therapy several more times, just to be certain. But this seemed to accomplish nothing, except to acclimate her to the cell. She never reacted so violently again, eventually just meditating for her time there." He shrugged, leading them left down a shorter stretch of white-painted hallway, with elegant paneled doors set at regular intervals.

"We've had good results with other patients, but it didn't induce her to talk. That was all she would ever say, that she hated the cold. It's only in the last few weeks that she consented to speak regularly, to anyone but her friend. And we still don't know why…"

Zuko blinked once. This was new. He forced himself to remember how they'd come into this line of conversation. "And has she been in the coolers recently? Any time before this suspicious outage?"

"No, not for a year, almost two now…" Kwan confirmed this with a glance at the clipboard. "You're used to blaming her when things go wrong, aren't you?" he asked suddenly, looking on Zuko with renewed interest. "It gives you a measure of comfort."

And Zuko was half-surprised at the poisonous smile he managed for the doctor, rather than setting his hair on fire. Maybe he'd learned a thing or two from Mai, after all. "If you're going to shrink heads, shrink my sister's. Then we'll talk."

Kwan barked out a strained laugh that didn't sound right, coming from him. "I'll hold you to that," he replied, only half-jokingly. He gestured down a bend in the bare and brightly lit hall, one of several that bore the sparser adornment of servants' quarters. "And anyway, you can see her for your—"

And he stopped at the sight of two guards standing on either side of a reinforced iron door, which Zuko thought must open on Azula's antechamber. Drawn from the ranks of the imperial firebenders, as were all his sister's guards, they bowed promptly at the appearance of their Fire Lord, and the two tailing Zuko greeted their fellows with the national salute.

"Why are there only two of you?" Kwan demanded, looking quite as upset as when he answered the door. "I left three guards with her, not two hours ago!"

"Lin went to report —" one of them began to reply.

"_Three?_" Zuko cut in angrily, before the guards could answer. They glanced at each other in silent confusion. "She's supposed to have at least **eight** guards on her, and more when she bends!"

The doctor had the good grace to look sheepish when he admitted, "She is sedated, Lord Zuko. There was no reason not to spare some of her men for the search…"

"No_ reason?_" Zuko actually shouted, his fists clenched compulsively. "I provide these guards out of my household troops, for the **sole** purpose of watching her! They're not _yours_ to command!"

He turned on the two that were left, as if to demand how their comrades could desert their post. The shorter of them adjusted his shoulder guards uncomfortably, his voice muffled by his helmet when he remarked, "My Lord must know, that it is also the duty of imperial firebenders to keep the general peace —"

"And our Lord probably _doesn't_ know," his broader fellow interrupted, with a bored flick of his gauntleted wrist, "that we get our pay through the facility, while we're here." The dark eyeholes of his triple-pronged helmet regarded Zuko blankly. "Yeah, no joke."

The Fire Lord pressed clenched fists to his temples, as if to keep his head from exploding at the sheer stupidity of it. Didn't these people know what she _was?_ "Open these doors," he bit out, bringing his fists down as if he would hit something. "_Right now_."

To their credit, the guards didn't feel the need to confirm his order with the physician. The shorter of the two opened the outermost door before him, while Kwan pulled his more outspoken fellow aside for a muted conversation. Zuko left his own guards to stand silently at attention in the hall, and followed the former inside the empty antechamber, watching as he slid open a viewing panel to the cell, to check the condition of its occupant.

Nodding once in reassurance, the guard slid the panel closed, and unlatched a series of locks and bolts that ran the length of the door. This one opened outward, to prevent Azula from hiding behind it when anyone entered her cell.

And Zuko grew very still, where he stood removed from the threshold. He remained silent long enough that Kwan joined him under the ceiling light with its protective metal cage, its soft gold glow cast into insignificance by the white light reflected off the padded walls inside.

"Her hair is brown," Zuko said in a quiet, deadly tone, his eyes fixed on the still figure lying with her back to the door.

Kwan looked at him like he thought the Fire Lord might have lost his mind, clipboard still clutched in hand. "I'm sorry?"

"AZULA!" he exploded, turning on the doctor so quickly he actually jumped and dropped his clipboard in surprise. "Her hair is **brown!** _Dark_ brown, like my **mother's!**" Zuko threw his hand out in a furious gesture at the feminine form, with black hair tucked under her head. "And she's **shorter**, that isn't _her!_"

Kwan paled visibly at the accusation and rushed into the cell, knelt beside the woman in crimson shirt and pants to turn her over and disprove it. It turned out she didn't just have shoulder-length black hair, but a button nose and a weak chin. And the beginnings of a bruise at her left temple. The physician appeared to be struck speechless.

"Is this your missing guard?" Zuko asked tightly, with what must have appeared remarkable calm to anyone on the outside, and even seemed so to him, considering he could hardly breathe. Now that he _knew_. Now that the inevitable had finally happened…

The physician stared at Zuko in silent shock, eyes popping in his lined face. No ready response from the guard who admitted him. The eyes of the imperial firebenders settled on him too, and he felt suddenly surrounded. Horribly, horribly vulnerable.

"Helmets off!" he barked at them, in an unaccustomed panic. "All of you!" he insisted, to the three who stood behind him in the hall, looking to each other with an uncertainty obvious even beneath the concealment of their uniforms. "Now!"

And the panic abated, when they removed their helmets to reveal four very different but all decidedly masculine faces blinking at him in confusion. None of which were his sister's. And Zuko remembered to breathe.

She wasn't here. Of course, she wasn't here. But where would she go? What would she do, now she was free? _Why did she do this?_ he couldn't help wondering, and hated himself for the accusation implicit in that. He should have expected this from her. Had been expecting it for a long time, if he was completely honest with himself. But it still hurt.

Zuko chided himself. Priorities.

"Dr. Kwan," Zuko addressed him where he knelt beside the unconscious guard. "Treat her injuries, but revive her as quickly as you can. She may have information we need." His hard tone seemed to snap the doctor out of his disbelief. He nodded once, and turned her head to the side, examining where she was struck before he checked her for other injuries.

"Guards —" he began, and tried not to sigh when they all four stood at attention, helmets tucked under their arms. "Those who came with me," Zuko specified. "Round up all remaining staff in the building. Search every floor. Cells, closets, offices, bathrooms, _everything_…"

"My Lord, if I may," Kwan looked up from the fallen guard, and Zuko nodded to indicate he could continue, "It is unlikely she's still in the facility. Her guards assisted the initial search. When it became clear the missing patients had escaped, I sent those guards to aid local authorities in searching the island. If the princess," he paused grudgingly, "_escaped_ at that time or after, there would be nothing to keep her here."

"She may be counting on that assumption, to hide in plain sight," Zuko countered harshly, and the physician returned to his work, chastened. "We can't take that chance."

The guards acknowledged his orders with short bows, and moved to don their helmets. Zuko stopped them with a raised hand. "Helmets off," he ordered shortly. "And make sure you can see the faces of everyone you search with. Have either of you seen Azula before?" it occurred to him to ask.

One of the two, with brown hair tucked behind his ears and an aquiline nose, remarked hesitantly, "I worked in the palace under your father, Lord Zuko."

"And you remember what she looks like?" Zuko pressed.

The guard smiled shyly, odd as that was to see in a man at least five years his senior, "It'd be hard to forget…"

Zuko glared at him, and he sobered quickly under the scrutiny. "If you find her, signal me with fire," he indicated his expectation by punching his fist into the air, "and send a hawk to the guard tower on the western bluffs. I'll be there, coordinating the search. You're dismissed." The guards bowed again to confirm their compliance, and set off down the hall.

"As for you —" Zuko turned to the two remaining.

"That's her," said the round-faced guard standing nearest Zuko, still staring at the woman in Azula's clothes. "That's, um…"

"Lin," put in the one remaining in the hall, who crossed beefy arms at the scene unfolding inside.

The first guard ignored him, looking a little desperately at Zuko. "I can't believe it! We didn't hear a thing!"

"I thought she was taking a minute," the other amended, arching a clever brow over dark eyes, "but she answered me, and it sounded enough like her. I thought nothing of it at the time."

His companion gave him an angry look, as if to say, _Don't _say_ that! What are you thinking?_ "We're **both** so sorry about this, my Lord!" he insisted. "I just can't believe this hap—"

"Yes, yes, it's fine," Zuko reassured them impatiently, palming his forehead in growing frustration. "You have nothing to fear from me, so long as you tell the truth."

The men exchanged a glance of resignation. And the story emerged fairly quickly from there…

It seemed Azula lately responded more favorably to her therapy sessions, when these were held in different places each time. After burning the conference table to ashes in her last session, and leaving an indelible scorch mark on the floor, she was moved today to a study that happened to be positioned directly above the cellars. It also shared wiring with the coolers below, and she insisted on checking every nook and cranny of the room for eavesdroppers. This behavior was unusual for her only insofar as she had not shown it for years, since before her starvation attempt.

Zuko was hardly surprised to hear, that an early investigation indicated a power surge had preceded, and probably caused, the outage in the coolers. In light of her escape, even Kwan did not seem to doubt that Azula was behind it. She would have needed only a moment, and it seemed she found that. Four years without any attempt at freedom had made them just careless enough. They had forgotten what she was capable of, if they ever bothered to know.

There was little other explanation for why, in the last few weeks, she had been allowed to speak with her guards in the context of therapy sessions. This after she attempted to talk to them, for the first time in literally years, from the confines of her padded cell. The imperial firebenders were barred from discussing anything approaching current events or personal details of their lives with her, the conversations closely monitored by Azula's doctors.

They hoped the princess might open her mind to these guards, after so far refusing her doctors. Kwan and his colleagues thought she better identified with her guards, because they were firebenders and shared the more martial aspects of her nature. This just proved how little they knew her. Azula didn't identify with anyone, Zuko recalled. She was just good at pretending.

And just like always, she got what she wanted for nothing. Having both talked to her, the two remaining guards could report that she enjoyed discussing subjects as diverse as military history and classical poetry, political philosophy and metaphysics. The one subject she would not discuss, was herself or anyone remotely connected to her. Overtures on this topic prompted only misdirections, silence, and eventual demands for a new conversational partner. With this seeming concession to the goals of her therapy, she succeeded in familiarizing herself with the voices, mannerisms, and general deportment of all her guards.

When most of the asylum staff were diverted to the search for the missing patients, this left only a handful of her guards to monitor Azula in her sedation. Patients were checked periodically for negative reactions to the sedative herbs, which interacted badly with some medications, and Azula was no exception to this rule. The shorter of the two guards checked her first, and said that had very definitely been her, when he entered the cell. The princess didn't stir, or give any sign of regaining consciousness.

Next Lin entered her cell, and remained inside for longer. It probably needn't have been _that_ long, as Zuko recalled now — to his chagrin — that he and his sister had both been trained how to quickly don the uniforms of imperial firebenders, in case it proved necessary to escape from the palace or conceal their movements. "Lin" supposedly emerged to say the princess looked a little anemic, and she thought she should report this to Dr. Kwan. Lacking timepieces or any view of the sky outside, the two guards remaining could not positively say when this had happened, except to speculate anywhere from thirty to forty minutes ago. When she didn't return, they assumed she was roped into the search.

It struck Zuko as a little suspicious — not to mention stupid — on their parts to send a single guard to check on her, but he reminded himself these were not their regular duties. This particular unit had been here less than a month, if he remembered the guard rotations right, and had limited opportunity, and probably inclination, to observe the orderlies about their work. Their own procedures were disrupted by the earlier escape. And Azula was expert at using systems to her gain. How else had she conquered Ba Sing Se?

The one part that did _not_ make an awful sort of sense to him, was how she had subdued a guard and left the cell under her own power. Kwan and the guards both confirmed that she had been sedated, and the effects should have lasted several more hours. To take the place of an imperial firebender and leave unnoticed, she could not have had any assistance, physical or otherwise.

It was just one question among many, several of them more pressing.

And so Zuko removed to the tower on the western bluffs. He quickly commandeered every member of the domestic forces remaining there, many of them summoned from their homes and beds to search for the initial escapees. Zuko sent these to comb Ember Island for his sister instead, and turn any other search parties they encountered to the task. Azula could not be allowed to leave the island, he knew, or she would become much harder to find.

Zuko dashed off quick instructions to the captain of his palace guard, and after a moment's hesitation, enclosed a letter to Mai. He knew he would not be able to think clearly, if he had to worry about his wife running off after Azula. Or him. He hoped it would not be necessary for her to actively protect their son, but this was certainly the most effective way to keep her out of danger. Zuko knew her well enough to know where her priorities would lie. If only he could say the same about his sister.

He next sent a messenger hawk to the harbor master, ordering that all ships should be kept at port … and he should sound the tsunami sirens. Without orders to evacuate, the residents of Ember Island would hole up in their homes. This served the dual purpose of keeping innocent people safe from Azula and the other escapees, and making the latter easier to spot. The search parties still had orders to search every dwelling, but the owners should be at home to oblige them.

He sent a third hawk to the capital prison, tripling the guard around his father just in case. The last thing he needed was for Azula to escape, only to spring the deposed Phoenix King from his cell. One threat on the loose was bad enough. And it was the one place he could actually guess she would go.

Between the messenger hawks he sent and those dispatched along with the search parties, Zuko soon found himself birdless despite the generosity of the local post office. He sent what little administrative staff remained to their homes, impatient with their chatter, their incessant demands. Zuko would sooner wait here alone, for news of the search. He needed quiet, he needed time to think…

No sooner had he thought this, than the low wail of the tsunami siren filled the stone tower, loud enough to make the walls vibrate and his jaw ache. Zuko stood from his chair at an empty desk in the candlelit interior of the tower, and walked quickly out a stone archway and onto the open roof atop a newer wing of the crumbling old structure.

He stopped at the gray stone half-wall that served as a railing, his hands gripping it while he glared down at waves of glassy black crashing against the dark rocks below. What bothered him most of all, perhaps, was the question of why she would do this **now?** Why _today_ of all —

Oh Agni. It was her **birthday**. And he was an idiot.

Much too late, he recalled Ty Lee's warning, a warning she didn't even know she was giving. A warning Azula may or may not have meant for him, but one he didn't heed… _She told me not to come back for her birthday! She must be depressed, or why else would she say that?_

Before he had time to dwell on the implications, another voice echoed from the depths of his memory, from another summer night spent on this island. _Come down to the beach with me. Come on, this place is depressing_.

And he knew where she was.

Of course. For the sake of the royal family's privacy and the fact that it lay abandoned, their old summer home wasn't even included on most maps of Ember Island. Azula needed a change of clothes, at the very least, before she could move about unnoticed. An imperial firebender traveling alone was a rare sight and likely to draw unwanted attention, especially outside the capital. And even if Azula knew he was looking for her, she would expect him to look anywhere else first. He knew how much she hated it there.

Zuko cursed under his breath, of all the times to realize this! He doubted any of the other search parties would think to look there, if they even remembered the isolated beach house. If only he hadn't sent everyone away. He turned back to the open archway whose light spilled over the worn stone tiles, then back to the sea in an agony of indecision. Every minute he wasted was a minute she could escape him.

Damn it, he had to _try_. And with this the extent of his deliberation, Zuko took off down to the wood stairs to the ground below. He made short time, as the guard tower wasn't very far from the house of that loathsome admiral's son, who hosted a party the last time they were all here together. He easily recalled the way.

He rounded a bend in the moonlit rocks that crept nearly to the water's edge, and found the remains of the fire he'd built that night, black ash barely discernible against the dark sands that blew into the pit over a period of years. This was all that was left of the mementos he'd burned.

Zuko kept climbing, and soon enough their abandoned vacation home loomed into view. There were no lights visible from the outside, but knowing his sister, there wouldn't be. He took a deep breath at the sight of that dwelling in shadow, reminded himself of his objective here.

He would confirm her presence — or not — no more. If he found her, he would signal the other search parties with his fire, just as he instructed them. He could follow her, and make sure she had no opportunity to leave the island until reinforcements arrived. Mai couldn't get _too_ mad at him for such a cautious plan, could she? he wondered. For all his earlier reservations, Zuko thought as he stealthily climbed the front steps that he really would have liked Mai at his back right now.

He eased one of the front doors open slowly and with care, relieved when the hinges didn't announce his presence here. It seemed that Katara's efforts to improve the abandoned home they shared with their friends had paid off. After fours years of neglect though, dust was thick on the floor again, as thick and suffocating as when he came here the time before, alone.

Zuko was more than a little disappointed at the lack of visible footprints. Could he have been wrong after all? he wondered, stepping inside and closing the door carefully behind him. But no, she might have just entered by another way. His footfalls sounded despite the dust, the faded wood floors unaccustomed to his weight, and a sudden idea struck him. Zuko removed his boots and left them sitting beside the doors. So he walked barefoot and silent up the narrow staircase, his ears pricked for any sign of Azula.

Still, the dust betrayed her presence first. In the moonlight that filtered down the hall from a broken window, he found not footprints, but what looked like long sweeps carved out of the dust. Drag marks? Could she be injured — or have injured someone else? Could he even be certain it was her?

His heart hammering in anticipation, Zuko crept to the nearest door the drag marks indicated, and pressed his right ear against it. Hearing no movement inside, he walked further down the darkened hall, and tried the next door. And the next. The last door was open, and he approached it more cautiously. He paused just outside the doorframe, his back pressed to the wood paneled wall.

"Not a _single_ pair of **pants** in her entire wardrobe?" Azula grumbled to herself. "Why am I not sur—"

And she stopped where she stood before the open wardrobe, turning quickly to face the door so the hem of her too-long robe brushed the dusty floor. Her long, wet hair hung down her back like a sheet. And he knew this because he was just barely peering into the room, all but the scarred side of his face still hidden behind the doorframe.

He did not remember deciding to look inside. That fact alone was troubling.

Her eyes widened at the sight of him, and Azula relaxed the stance she took, but just slightly. Zuko stepped fully into her view, his purpose already compromised. And he had never been one to hide pointlessly. Or to run from a fight.

A long moment passed before she spoke.

"You came back."

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**Evil cliffhanger is evil. Please leave a review. **

**Incidentally, for anyone who was wondering ... It is a coincidence that Azula found herself in the right room to execute her plan ON her birthday. Given that she was still not choosing the locations for her therapy sessions, she might have found herself in a suitable room either somewhat before or after her birthday. In which case, she just would have escaped then. **

**I just liked the poetic justice of it, I suppose.**


	7. Redirecting Lightning

**Warning****: Read this author's note.**

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**Seriously, read it.**

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**I will know it if you don't.**

**This chapter depicts some disturbing events, and makes no attempt to sugarcoat them. As a result, it probably pushes an M rating, and may even cross that line at points. However, I have read enough to know what I've written is not as explicit as it could be, and for that reason (and the fact said explicitness has been the exception rather than the rule) I have no immediate plans to up the T rating of **_**Dominion**_**. If, after reading, you would like to suggest that I do so, feel free. I will consider any arguments to the case.**

**My reason for this change in tone is simple. I think it's necessary for readers to know exactly **_**what**_** happened, in order for them to begin to understand **_**why**_** it happened. Also, it would probably push willing suspension of disbelief just a little too far to me to simply say it happened, without the readers seeing what brought them to this.**

**That said, I anticipate a strong reaction to events in this chapter. I welcome it, so long as it's intelligently expressed. And no, I'm not going to warn you any more specifically than I have about events in this chapter, despite the conventions of fanfic. Please trust me when I say you'll see it coming. Whether you choose to read on is yours to consider.**

**This seems as good a time as any to show my hand, and admit that I have intended **_**Dominion**_** from the start as something of a deconstruction. Not just of Azula and Zuko as characters or their relationship on the show, but of everything I've read about them in fanfiction. And believe me, that's a lot. **

**You've already seen me deconstruct some time-honored tropes of Azula redemption-fic, and this trope is no exception. Yes, I AM going there. First, because it interests me. Second, because I've yet to see it handled to my satisfaction.**

**The obligatory disclaimer: No, I do not approve of this behavior in real life. I am well-aware that it is sick, sad, and twisted. I would remind you these are fictional characters, however attached we may get to them. This chapter was very difficult for me to write, for exactly that reason. And other reasons. But having come this far, I could do no less.**

**Also, my sincerest apologies for the long delay in updating. Besides the difficulty writing I previously mentioned, my job has been kicking my ass on a pretty regular basis for the past few months, leaving me barely time enough for sleep or a social life, let alone hobbies. Now that I've crossed this threshold though, I will try to update more regularly. Especially considering the evil cliffhanger at the end of this chapter. (That is becoming something of a thing for me.)**

**Anyway, now that you've been thoroughly warned in the vaguest possible terms, please do enjoy your reading. And review.**

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Zuko stared. He couldn't help it. He hadn't seen her in four years.

He didn't know what he expected from the escapee of an asylum, but this wasn't it. Gone were the hacked off bangs, the dark circles under her eyes, the nails clipped short for her own and others' protection. No trace of her nearly successful attempt at starvation, or the resulting illness that almost killed her, even when she stopped. Her cheekbones were a little more prominent than he remembered, perhaps, the subtle hollows of her face barely discernible in the moonlight that fell softly on everything in the room, what he realized now was their mother's bedroom.

It was that resemblance that struck him most, to see Azula standing there in his mother's robe. He recognized the elegant swirls embroidered at the neck, the hem she was too short to keep from dragging in the dust. And even if she inherited their father's sharp chin and slanted eyes, she had Ursa's hair and painted mouth, and lined her eyes with kohl.

It barely occurred to him to wonder where she found cosmetics, when Azula hadn't stayed here since she was a little girl. His mother's robe, his mother's paints… How in eight years had he never noticed, that she tinted her lips the very same shade?

Then she spoke, and the illusion was shattered.

"You were already on the island," Azula realized aloud, her eyes narrowed intently, her stance loose but ready, "or you couldn't have got here so quickly." Zuko took a careful step into the room, and she stepped sideways. But not back, never back. "You … came to see me?" she spoke slower, almost tentatively. "Why?"

"I hardly think that _matters_ now, after what you've **done!**" Zuko reproached her, angry not just at her escape anymore, but something he couldn't even name…

"It matters to me," she said simply. And looked sincere as she always did, when she lied.

"Then why **do** this, Azula?" he demanded, with an angry thrust of his hand. "Why reject my help, your doctors' help —"

"_Your_ help?" she cut across him, eyes lighting with resentment. "And what **help** is that? Shutting me up like some kind of _leper?_" And Zuko couldn't help flinching at her accusation, when it was one he'd put to himself.

"Do you really expect me to believe," she said darkly, her fingers curling into fists, "I would have left that place any other way?"

"You're a danger to yourself and other people," Zuko insisted in a hard tone, taking another step closer to another of her sidesteps. "You would have left when you were **ready**, when your _doctors_ said you were ready!"

"You don't know **anything!**" Azula snapped at him, and it wasn't anger that flashed across her face when she shouted this, but pain. "Those _doctors_ don't know anything. I came as far as I could there, and I did it on my **own!**"

He blinked once at her defiance, reminded uncomfortably of another confrontation, one he stood on the other side of. "And how far have you come," he said carefully, stepping onto the edge of an elaborate rug to see she didn't yield, "when cold gives you a nervous breakdown?"

Azula took her cue from his measured tone. Her face fell with practiced ease into a familiar expression of contempt. "That was two years ago," she coolly replied. "Maybe you should check notes with Uncle Fatso."

Zuko scowled at the demeaning nickname, though he supposed he shouldn't expect her to be grateful to Uncle. "And your hallucinations?" he said flatly.

"I banished them." Something eerily like pride suffused her, her lips just curved in a characteristic smirk. "All but one."

His eyes widened in sudden realization. "Mom…" he whispered.

Azula nodded once, stepping into a square of moonlight that shone through the broken window panes and onto the dusty floor, watching his eyes follow her. "Have you found her?"

"Are — are you **serious?**" Zuko asked her in disbelief, and mounting frustration. Oh gods, just _what_ was wrong with her? "Of course I haven't! How could you think I _had?_"

"I've been locked in an asylum, Zuko," she replied, arms propped casually on hips. "They say for four years." And her tone was more remarkable for what wasn't in it. No acid sarcasm, no condescension, no blame even, at least for the moment. Just a statement of fact. "How would I know, when you don't tell me?"

And suddenly, her letters made a little more sense. Not much, but a little more. "You really think," he said slowly, his brow relaxing its scowl in surprise, "I'd keep her from you?"

Her expression didn't change, and he realized this was exactly what she thought. "You did it once. You could do it again."

"Will you listen to yourself?" Zuko said hoarsely. But his voice gained volume with the strength of his conviction, and he moved closer, stirring up dust from the rug. "_This_ is supposed to convince me you're **sane?**" His hands clenched reflexively. "You're as **paranoid** as ever!"

A bitter smile flit across her face. "I don't mean to convince you of anything," she contradicted almost gently, spreading her hands, and withdrew from him as if to confirm this. But Zuko was put instantly on guard, when he realized their wary circling had brought her closer to the door than he stood. "You'll see what you want to see. You always have."

"Then what do you **want**, Azula?" he demanded, a little desperate to keep her talking, already contemplating what he would do if she ran. "What do you want?!"

"I want to be better," she admitted steadily, and looked straight at him when she said it. But there was a crease between her brows, as if she were daring him to laugh at her. "And I think the only way to make this stop, is to find her."

Zuko's mind ground to a halt. "You want to find ... Mom?" he all but whispered.

Azula drew a deep breath. "Yes."

And Zuko had to make a conscious effort to crush the hope that surged like fire in his veins. The tiny voice of truth that said if anyone could do the impossible, it was Azula.

"You _hated_ her! You didn't even **care** when Dad sent her away!" Zuko said harshly through the tears that stung his eye, remembering her cruel taunts. _Her lies, her __**lies**_… She knew just what he wanted to hear. "And you really expect me to believe that?"

"I stopped expecting anything from you a long time ago," she coldly replied, looking on his tears unmoved.

His brow furrowed in surprise, he didn't miss her reproach. "Then why bother telling me this?"

"Oh, I don't know, because you _asked?_" Azula said contemptuously, spreading the fingers of her left hand as if to number his absurdities. "I don't delude myself you'd help me, even for something we **both** want." She sidled between Zuko and the door, and her fingers closed into a fist that she held tightly to her chest, as if she were guarding her heart. "All I require is that you stay out of my way."

"You **require?**" he echoed, incredulous. Zuko advanced on her in growing anger, but she held her ground. "You're in no position to make demands!" he reminded her, with a sweep of his hand for added emphasis. "A _disgraced_ princess with nothing but an **empty** title to her name! No money, no power, no friends —"

"_I have friends!_" Azula cut across him, taking exception to this, of all claims.

"_What _makes you think you can **find** her?" Zuko shouted, the fire of his resentment stoked when she stepped forward to meet him. "I'm the _Fire Lord!_" He gestured to himself, as if this needed reinforcing. "I have a whole **nation** at my command, and I couldn't do it!"

"It wouldn't be the first time I succeeded where you _failed_," Azula swiftly replied. Her mouth framed the words just the way he remembered, she lifted her chin to meet his glare.

"It doesn't **work** like that anymore!" he said hotly, fists clenched to match her own. Zuko was nearly close enough to lay hands on her now, and two steps away from trying it. "In case you haven't noticed, _I'm_ not the one who landed in an **asylum!**"

Azula went very still, her eyes fixed on him with an awful intentness, in the electric pause that fell with his words. And the distance between them seemed suddenly greater. Even in his anger, Zuko knew he'd crossed a line. But the thought of apologizing to Azula was as foreign to him as bending water. He didn't owe her anything.

He didn't owe her anything.

"No," his sister said slowly at last, her every word calculated for maximum effect, "you're just the one who put me there, and forgot that I exist." The righteous anger he wore like a mask slipped just a little at her cutting words, but if Azula noticed, she gave no sign.

"So much better to be cruel than crazy, isn't it?" she whispered, close enough that Zuko could just glimpse something sad and secret behind her eyes. "I should know."

But Zuko knew too well what she was trying to do, and to steel himself against it. "I might feel worse about — Hey!" he cried in surprise, when Azula ducked to the side of him and made a break for the door, predictably, with no warning whatsoever.

Zuko took two steps after her, before he remembered his intention to signal the search parties, and ran for the window instead. He made a promise to Mai. And he was a father now, he forced himself to recall. He had to be more careful than —

A whip of blue fire lashed out from behind him, and just scorched his neck to leave an angry welt. Zuko clapped a hand to his burn and turned on his heel with a sharp cry, more of surprise than pain, to face Azula. His sister stood just outside the door, two fingers extended and her hand held closely to her chest. "That's not what you came here for," she chided, a familiar promise written in the arch of her brows.

"That **hurt!**" Zuko hissed furiously, aware even as he spoke what a childish sentiment it seemed under the circumstances.

Azula looked on him without pity, her petite form framed by the door. "You never should have turned your back on me."

Zuko's eyes widened, his breath caught in his throat. Had she really just come out and _said_… "Azula —" he tried, but her expression hardened the moment his gave a little.

"Why are you here?" she demanded, fingers still drawn and ready, her tone as harsh as any interrogator's. She took a slow step back into the hall.

"To bring you to justice," Zuko replied automatically, because he'd said it to himself and other people enough times that that must make it true. "You need to be tried for your crimes in the war," he insisted, ignoring how her teeth ground at the suggestion that what she'd done was wrong. "And as soon as you're sane, you will be."

"Well, if _that_ isn't an incentive to recovery, I don't know what is."

"This isn't a **game**, Azula!" Zuko retorted, his hands held loosely at his sides, ready to deflect her next attack. He followed her deeper inside without conscious decision. "Our nation owes it to the world to hold people like _you_ to account."

"People like me…" she echoed quietly, and let down her hand, her eyes fixed on him as if waiting for some sign. Of what, he didn't know.

"Your posturing is tiresome as ever," Azula said at last, in a tone that made it clear just how much she despised him, "and I've had enough judgment to last me a lifetime." She uttered the words with all the vehemence of a curse. "No thanks."

His eyes popped in disbelief. Did she really still think she could _talk_ her way out of this? "You're **coming with me **if I have to call the _entire_ _imperial guard _down on you!" Zuko snarled, moving to the nearest window to make good on his threat.

"If you drag other people into this," Azula warned, her voice low and silky, "I'll have no choice but to do the same." And he turned to face her, his brow knit with confusion. "I hear I have a nephew now," she said, and her eyes gleamed darkly out at him from under the line of her brows. "Does he know he has an aunt?"

He tensed in immediate suspicion, and had to make a conscious effort to calm the racing of his heart. Was she really suggesting… "No," Zuko stiffly replied, "he does— I haven't told him about you."

And Azula smiled. It was not a nice smile. "Five points for good parenting, Zuzu," she condescended, turning quite casually to leave. "Kids are scared enough of imaginary monsters at that age." Her voice fell as she moved off down the hall. "How soundly would he sleep, if he knew about _me?_"

"You **stay away **from my _family!_" Zuko snapped, rushing out the door after her to make sure she got the message.

"You seem to forget they're **my** family too, if I wanted anything to do with them," Azula neutrally replied, not even bothering to turn around, her back to him like an invitation. "How lucky for you, that I _don't_."

And Zuko stopped outside the threshold, his eyes fixed on the waist-length hair that fell between her shoulders. "So why don't we make a deal?" Azula said flatly, her arms crossed in front of her, stance distinctly forbidding. She turned her head, not far enough to look at him, and what little he could see of her face gleamed like a half-moon palely out of the dark. "Leave me alone to find Mother, and I will have nothing more to do with you. Or yours."

"What?" Zuko whispered, unsure what to think of this.

"If the best I can expect from you is _neglect_," she explained, her voice grown clipped with impatience, "the best you can expect from me is neglect. Not quite as nice as having me under your **thumb**, to be sure," Azula added coldly, lifting her chin, "but don't pretend you wouldn't rather I was gone."

"Azula —" he tried, but she turned her face away, dismissing anything he might have said.

"This is the best offer you're going to get," she quietly concluded, inclining her head. "And the last."

Zuko swallowed hard, wondering why she wouldn't look at him. "You're crazy," he said at last, watching her as closely as if he expected her to spontaneously combust. "And I won't promise you anything."

Azula turned to face him then, and he saw her fingers were drawn, arms crossed over her chest to hide her intent. Her left arm shot toward him, her right swept a sharp arc aimed at his feet. Two bursts of blue flame were her answer, before she ever said, "So be it."

Zuko brought his arms up in a quick block, but had to break his root to spare his bare feet the worst of the flames. Dodging to the other side of the hall, he hit her with a flaming roundhouse kick, but Azula ducked and turned her momentum to a spin. Her leg flashed out from the folds of her robe, and swept an arc of fire across the narrow floor that toppled him.

The fight might have ended right then, if Zuko hadn't seen what he saw next: Azula caught herself in a crouch, and her arm gave from the pressure, dropping her painfully on her left hip. His eyes went wide even as he rolled away from the fireball she punched at him, two seconds too late, and onto his feet. Azula sprang back up in the same instant, hands raised before her in a stance that matched his own.

Such a small tell, but it spoke volumes. Azula of the cat-like grace _never_ fumbled a landing. And suddenly he realized how she deceived them all: The asylum staff sedated her so much, she must have built up a tolerance. But it wasn't complete, and Kwan told him they dosed her higher than usual tonight.

Zuko had the advantage here. And the black look Azula gave him said she knew that he knew.

With no more warning than a curl of her lip, Azula punched downward with both fists, and Zuko had to dodge back into his mother's room to avoid getting blown into the wood paneled wall. The concussive blast of blue flame left a smoldering hole in the floor where he'd been standing.

So much for the sedatives affecting her bending, he thought grimly, poking his head out the door to see Azula running for the stairs. And Zuko vaulted over the scorched floorboards in close pursuit, igniting whips of fire in his hands and bringing them down on her head — or where it would have been, if she hadn't already disappeared down the stairs to the dust-choked landing on the second floor. He cursed, sprinting after her and considering his options.

Zuko's advantage in physical strength would benefit him little, unless he could fight her at close range. Azula would also have a harder time bending at him without risking injury to herself. He would have to hope she was rational enough to consider that —

He jumped the last few stairs to the landing, firing off two bursts of flame at her as he fell. Azula twisted at the waist and bent an arm behind her to deflect his first blast, even as she ran for the stairs. But Zuko had put more force behind his second, and it knocked her off her feet. Azula tumbled painfully end over end through the dust, her short, sharp cries punctuated by the dull thuds of her repeatedly striking the gray stone floor. She missed the stairs and hit one of the wood columns to the side of them instead.

Zuko closed quickly on her, one fist held protectively in front of him, his other hand at the ready. "Surrender _now_, Azula!" he ordered harshly, stopping just short of where she started to pick herself up off the floor. "I don't want to hurt you."

"Of _course_ you do," Azula darkly contradicted him. Her hair spilled over her face, making it impossible to glimpse her expression. But her clenched fists and the tension in her arms made her intent obvious enough to Zuko. "You just don't want to admit that you **can't!**" And with this last, she twisted where she knelt on knees and elbows, sitting abruptly to cast her hand out at Zuko.

He swept his arms before him to disperse the flames that never came. This did nothing for the dust she threw in his eyes. Zuko fell back, coughing and swiping at his eyes, just in time to avoid the kick she twisted to aim at his legs.

He dimly perceived her jump quickly to her feet, tossing her hair behind her shoulders, but Azula moved out of his limited field of vision. Zuko just managed to throw his arms up in a partial block, but couldn't see where her attack was coming from. The burst of blue flame threw him across the room and into the little console table that sat beneath the discolored wall where their family portrait used to hang.

The table shattered on impact, and Zuko's vision swam when he tried to pick himself up from the debris, wondering if he'd broken any bones. He thought Azula might have done when she hit that column, from how slowly she walked up to him now, holding her left side.

"You're proving unusually hard-headed tonight," she remarked, stopping beside one of the large decorative urns that lined the wall to run her free hand along its smooth black side, brushing away the dust that coated it. "So much the worse for your head." And she gave the urn a mighty shove that would have toppled it on Zuko, if he hadn't rolled stiffly out of the way and back to his feet. It crashed to the floor instead, shattering on top of the sad remains of the table.

Zuko had to watch it fall out of the corner of his eye, wondering what would possess her to try something like that; he led Azula's retreat with a gout of flames from his outstretched arm that cut her off from the stairs. She didn't bother to block his fire, circling nimbly out of the way instead. She wanted to knock him unconscious? he considered. Zuko couldn't believe she hadn't tried to throw lightning at him yet, if she was as fast as Uncle said. Unless she was just afraid he would redirect it…

Azula put the stair rail between herself and Zuko before she returned fire, bringing her right arm up over her head and then down in a sharp arc, two fingers extended. Her strike made all the more elegant by the long, trailing sleeve of her robe, fringed with gold, that followed the arc of her flames. Could she mean to take him hostage? Zuko thought, abandoning his own efforts to break her wave of fire with a roundhouse kick. She had to know he would never go along with that.

But Azula turned a quick circle, arms drawn to her chest as if to build momentum, before Zuko realized she was building up to a fresh blow. When she threw her left arm out with a bolt of blue flame, he crossed his arms solidly in front of him, and even blocking it fully, was still pushed back by the force of her strike.

He grit his teeth in frustration, falling into a crouch and swinging his legs in two low, sweeping kicks that loosed a ring of fire around him. She would keep this up as long as she needed, until he made a fatal mistake. Azula knew where her weakness lay, and as long as she could confine their fight to open spaces like the dusty landing, she would never let him get close enough to incapacitate her.

His flames rushed through the gaps in the stair rail. Azula leapt atop it in a handstand that would have done Ty Lee proud, but didn't make the mistake of trying to support her weight with her arms for very long. Instead she twisted in midair, kicking flames down at him even as she righted herself on the rail, balancing on both bare feet with her arms held out at her sides. A quick tremor that rippled through her was the only sign of the effort this cost Azula.

But she also didn't seem to want Zuko to alert his forces to her location, he realized. He took advantage of her distraction to fake a run at the wall of windows lined with rice paper, interspersed with wood columns behind him. And the silvery light of the moon was cast into insignificance by a swift burst of blue flame from behind him, that cut off his route to the windows. Her warning shot.

Zuko spun on his heel, and threw a series of flaming punches in quick succession, just as she jumped down from the stair rail. Azula blocked them with a high sweep of her leg; the last snuffed out some distance from her, when she reached into the air and closed her hand into a fist. "No one else to fight your battles now," she said darkly.

"We'll see," was all Zuko replied, smiling inwardly when her eyes narrowed at his implication. And he bolted for the stairs they just descended, gaining them before she could take another shot at him. Her flames chased him up the stairs, as relentless as their source. Zuko could hear her close behind him, and allowed himself a moment of relief that she took the bait, even as he searched his memory for where up here would be best to trap her…

He was thinking a little too hard, unfortunately, to remember the smoking hole Azula blew in the floorboards outside their mother's room, and tripped in it on his way down the hall. Zuko swore softly, and had to throw himself through the door into the bedroom to avoid a fresh blast of blue flame she threw at him. He just managed to lock the door behind him when he heard her soft footfalls come to a stop outside; his eyes cast about the room, searching for some way to salvage this ambush— The wardrobe!

Zuko just managed to hide himself inside, drawing the paneled door nearly closed, when her first kick struck the bedroom door. The next blew it off its hinges in a burst of flame. It landed in a splintered heap not far from where he hid. And Zuko narrowed his eyes in the musty darkness of the wardrobe, watching her step foot inside the room, her hands held loosely before her, fingers joined. Her eyes searched shadows and corners for him.

He tensed in anticipation. Just a little closer, and she would — she would remember she hadn't closed the wardrobe door. And Zuko cursed himself for forgetting she had a near-perfect memory, thought back to that one time he'd searched her room. How careful he'd been to put everything back exactly where he found it, and she _still_ knew. His sister never missed little details like that, and hadn't let him live it down for days.

As if Azula heard his thoughts, her eyes darted to the wardrobe. Her head turned directly toward him, and a wicked smirk curved her lips. With two fingers extended and a casual turn of her wrist, she set the wardrobe aflame.

But Zuko had already burst from hiding in the eerie flickering of her blue fire, and leapt at her with a war cry, and daggers of flame in his hands. Azula ducked his swing and rolled swiftly to the side. He turned on her to press his advantage, but she sprang up to meet him quicker than he expected, and they collided…

Zuko froze in the warm orange light of the wardrobe that burned freely beside them now, when her left hand grabbed the back of his neck — and two fingers of her right thrust into the hollow of his jaw. The daggers of flame in his hands went out, bare inches from burning her robe. Without them, he probably looked like he'd paused in the act of hugging her, and thought better of it. But he didn't dare try to remove his hands.

She had only to ignite the fire at her fingertips, and he was dead.

"Is this what you wanted?" Azula said softly, lifting her head so the tip of her nose just brushed his chin. And Zuko realized, bitterly, that she guessed his intent.

He stiffened at her closeness. Her body was pressed right against him, leaving little to the imagination. He was probably about to die. So he really should be thinking of anything other than how very thin her robe was.

Her hand ran slowly up the back of his hair, and Azula leaned her head close to whisper, "You were a fool to come alone." Her voice was low and almost seductive, her breath hot in his ear. "And if you try to hold me here, I'll show you just how much."

But Zuko jerked back reflexively before she could conclude her threat, when he felt the smallest of tugs at the back of his head — _He should have remembered she was left-handed_ — This was probably all that saved his life, when Azula slashed downward with the pin that held his topknot in place, opening a stinging gash beneath his right eye.

And Zuko struck her hard across the face.

She fell back from the force of his blow and dropped the golden pin, her lip split and bleeding. Zuko stared in horror first at her and then at the hand he still held before him, as if he suspected it of acting against his will. He hadn't meant to do — How could he — _Why couldn't she just be _normal? the old resentment drowned out his shock, when Azula reached up to touch her bleeding lip and laughed once, harshly. And something in him broke.

With an inarticulate howl of rage, Zuko charged at her, grabbing Azula around the waist to ram her brutally into the nightstand beside the crimson-draped canopy bed. She uttered a faint gasp of pain when she hit, knocking the glass lamp to the floor where it shattered, but then bent in his grip. Lithe fingers grabbed the sash that cinched his waist to pull his long vest up over his head — and set it on fire. And Azula slipped his grasp.

He tore and twisted his way from the burning cloth with an angry shout, stifling her flames with his own bending. Zuko threw the charred silk aside and gave chase when he found Azula fleeing. He overtook her at the foot of the bed. She favored her left ankle, and it occurred to some distant, rational part of him that she might have turned it when he rushed her.

Zuko grabbed her wrist to jerk her back, and didn't know he burned her until he felt the heat beneath his fingers. Her twisted ankle could not support her weight when he pulled, and Azula fell against him with a sharp cry that choked off too quickly, as if she were afraid to make a sound.

He barely had time to register this, his hand still gripped her hot and blistered skin, when Azula pressed a soft kiss to the side of his neck. Zuko went absolutely still, his face frozen in surprise even if he didn't let her go. His stomach lurched like he stepped off the edge of a precipice, fallen into the gap between who he was before she did this, and now. He still stood in that attitude when her free hand slid under the crossed collar of his crimson shirt.

Her fingertips on his skin were electric, and Zuko exhaled a shuddering breath when he remembered to breathe again. She was— Why was she— _What?_ He struggled to form a coherent thought, or even conceive of his danger, when he leaned into her next kiss, and her teeth pulled at the soft skin where his neck joined his shoulder. Her nails began to scratch, he could feel her tense against him…

_No_. The word cut like morning light through the fog that settled on his mind. He gripped her arms hard to throw her off. And ended up not letting go, when Azula only kissed him more insistently, her arms twisted in his grasp as if she would tear free and … what? Kill him?

Her feverish kisses gave Zuko the odd impression of being circled, as if she were only looking for an opening to land a fatal blow. He bent his head to try to glimpse her expression in the moonlight that shone through the broken window panes. If he could just catch her gaze, he would know why — He would know what to do.

But her eyes were tightly closed as a child's who pretends to be invisible, just because she cannot see. Tears struggled at the corners of them, and she turned her face away when Zuko brought his mouth too close to hers. _Such a fucking tease_, the ugly thought burst into his mind like a dam breaking.

His jaw clenched at the slight, and he grabbed for the knot that cinched her robe, tearing it asunder with hands more forceful than skilled. There was nothing she could hide from him, whatever she thought. Azula didn't try to stop him, but shivered once as if with cold when her robe fell open. Her fingers grasped his collar, and she pressed closer, as if to hide herself against him —

But Zuko refused her, tore the shirt impatiently from his shoulders and cast it to the gray stone floor, like throwing down a gauntlet. He wouldn't give her any purchase. He could hear his own blood pound in his ears, when he seized her face in his hands to force her acknowledgment.

"_Look_ at me!" he demanded unnecessarily, for all that his fingers nearly closed about her neck, his thumbs forked beneath her chin to make it so. But Zuko stopped at the face she showed him.

Her dark brows drew low over amber eyes that were impenetrable as two stones. The curve of her mouth was as fixed as a painted smile on a porcelain face. She didn't feel anything. _She never did_.

Zuko hated that smirk at once, wanted nothing so much as to see it gone. It was wrong, as wrong as everything about her. That was the only motive he could think of to explain why he pressed his mouth to hers, if he had been interested in explanations at the moment. But the only thought that broke through his haste was that she tasted like blood.

Her fingers trailed down his chest to strip the cloth belt from his waist, and loose the fly of his pants. He made a strangled sound deep in his throat when he felt her hand on— but his step back landed on broken glass, and it was hard to decide which was the more immediate concern. These distractions might account for why he didn't realize she was pushing him gradually toward the bed, until he hit the edge of it and sat abruptly.

He grabbed her arm reflexively and pulled her along, vowing she would not escape him. But Azula sprang in behind him without resistance, an unexpected concession, and would have turned his momentum against him to pin Zuko to the dusty covers, if he hadn't scrambled back to the dark wood headboard.

There was nowhere to go then, no time for any defense when Azula practically climbed him in her urgency. Her fingernails carved furrows in his neck and shoulders, she trailed heated kisses down his scar. His hands had found their way inside her robe, and he held her hips in place with a bruising grasp. He lifted his head, and his mouth captured hers. His teeth tugged at her lip, demanding admission, until she bit down hard on his, and he entered her.

Azula gave a soft gasp, such a small sound he might have missed it, had his every sense not been heightened by an adrenaline rush he could only compare to redirecting lightning. To hold so much power in his hands…

He felt her whole body tense up around him, her arms closed about his neck to pull him into the closest thing to a hug they'd shared since they were children. Something coiled in his chest and threatened to break, when her breath came so hard and fast he thought she might be having a panic attack.

Zuko said something indistinct into her ear, but lost even that limited clarity when she reached into his hair, and spread her knees wider to sink into him. He groaned and fell back against the headboard with her. He couldn't keep his hold even as Azula tightened hers, gripping his hair hard to pull herself up, moving her body against his in a slow grind.

His low moans corresponded to the speed of her movements, and even he couldn't tell just what they signified anymore. Azula looked over his shoulder, her face turned into the headboard so he couldn't see the awful concentration in it, her breathing strictly controlled. As if she were performing some complicated kata. Her eyes were closed, her mouth set in a pained grimace.

She began banging his head against the wall and top of the headboard with every grind, and Zuko was still too overwhelmed to do more than try to reach for her bent arms or trailing sleeves, to stop her. But his nerveless fingers wouldn't obey him, could not seem to stray above her waist. And anyway, what would happen if he let go? Who knew what she would do? Who knew what —

And suddenly as Azula began, she pulled him upright again, both of them panting, Zuko still trembling from their exertion. She shifted where she sat on top of him, but couldn't disengage when he still held her hips against him. Instead her fingers clenched in his hair, and she jerked his head back, forcing him to look her in the face.

A thin sheen of sweat covered both their skins. His lips were parted, his scar flushed crimson, and the train of Ursa's robe spread out behind her on the dusty bed. He thought he saw his own anguish in her mouth drawn tight. Her eyes accused him. They had the same eyes.

They were the same. They were the same…

"Now you've taken everything from me," she whispered harshly. "Is it enough? Will it ever be?"

"_Never_," Zuko breathed. A reply more articulate perhaps, but no less unthinking than any other she compelled from him tonight.

Her sudden stillness was his only warning, but this time, he heeded it. Zuko threw her on her back with a wordless cry of outrage. She hit the mattress so hard her head bounced, and the daggers of blue flame in her hands went out. His long hair singed and smoking, he fell on her in an instant. He couldn't let her bend again at such close quarters, she would kill him…

He moved hastily to pin her down, grabbing her arms to restrain her. But she twisted beneath him, kneeing Zuko in the ribs to try to throw him off. A pained grunt escaped him, he winced and almost lost his hold. Her eyes blazed hatred at him. Her teeth were bared in an almost animal expression, when she inhaled sharply. It would be all she needed to finish him —

Without time even for conscious thought, he crushed his mouth against hers, and stole her breath before she could ignite. Azula jolted with surprise and a frantic noise of protest that died in her throat, without voice. Zuko only deepened the kiss, and she wrenched in his grasp, arched beneath him in a last desperate attempt at escape. But he clamped an arm around her waist and gripped the damp hair at the nape of her neck, holding her so tightly against him he left her no room to move.

As if this had been a signal, she shuddered once and went still, without explanation. It felt enough like surrender that Zuko broke from her, breathing hard, and laid his head against hers, his harsh exhalations stirring dust from the faded covers. He could feel her heart beat much too fast behind her ribs, like a bird breaking itself on the bars of its cage. Zuko wondered, distantly, if there was even more wrong with her than he knew.

It was the last coherent thought he managed, before he found himself again in her midst, before he barely felt her fingers dig into his back, her nails break skin. There was too much else to feel, and he didn't know what to call any of it. And she was close, so close he couldn't tell her heat from his own, where he ended or she began. She would be the end of him.

She cried out once, and his stomach twisted with guilt, but he didn't stop, couldn't make out what she screamed before she strangled the sound in her throat, as if she were scared of getting caught. Then there were only his ragged breaths and her shallow ones, and waves beating a slow and ceaseless assault against the gray sands outside. She didn't speak again and only held tighter, as certain as Zuko, it seemed, that letting go would mean her death…

He had no way of telling how much time had passed, when he surfaced from the black well of instinct with a shudder, and realized he was spent. Azula lay still beneath him, her thin fingers resting lightly on his shoulder blades and the back of his neck. With what felt like a monumental effort, Zuko pulled away just enough to look at her, and her arms offered no resistance, she registered no reaction.

She was gone.

That first glimpse of her face was like a dagger to the heart. Her eyes were empty of recognition. Her lips moved silently, forming the same word over and over again. But he couldn't read it.

A deep and visceral horror filled him. She was never this bad before. He did this, he **did** this…

But no sooner had he reached for the tears that drew streaks from the corners of her eyes to her hairline, than she changed, with frightening swiftness. Her vacant gaze lit with a predatory gleam, a look he'd seen her wear before, but one he caught more often from his father.

Azula pushed him off and climbed quickly astride him, holding him down with no more than her little weight and a hand on his chest. She reached up with the other and turned his face away, pushing his scarred cheek to the rumpled sheets. Her sharp nails pressed lightly into his skin.

Even if Zuko couldn't see what she was doing, he could feel it. She had pushed him beyond the limits of his endurance, in more ways than one. But he couldn't stop his body responding to hers, though it protested now as strongly as his mind. Oh Agni, this was wrong. This was _so_ wrong…

"Aaah-ah! Ngh…" was all the objection Zuko could manage, when she thrust herself aggressively against him. It was too much. He had nothing left to give, and she was hurting him.

Azula leant down, her hand pressing harder against his jaw. Her hair fell over them like a curtain descending. "You're mine. You'll _stay_ mine," she breathed, and her voice sent a shiver down his spine. She didn't even sound like herself.

"You will **bend** for me, you will _obey_ me." She punctuated each command with a thrust of her hips, and Zuko's hands on them did little to deter her. "You'll never tell. _You'll never tell_. And even if you tried," she faltered here, and had to choke out, "who would believe you?" Her tears fell on his chest, so hot they almost scalded, when she whispered haltingly, "Azula always lies. _Azula always _— lies…"

And Zuko turned his head to look at her when she drew back. Her hands pressed against his chest, her fingers clenched and unclenched compulsively. Frozen with the shock of realization, she looked down on him as if she'd just woken from a nightmare, to find it followed her into the waking world. "No…" she whispered brokenly, her voice edged with panic.

"Azu— 'Zula," he tried, reaching up to grasp her shaking hands. But she tore them from his fingers, her teeth clenched with disgust. Making up her mind to run, she tried to climb off of him, but her legs shook and couldn't support her weight, and Azula only fell in beside him.

With the last of his dwindling strength, Zuko pulled her against him, holding her head to his chest. He felt her fingers ghost over the starburst scar she left him with the last time they fought, and come to rest there. The rest of her trembled with rage.

"I missed you," he offered weakly, too exhausted to realize this was the first time he had admitted it to anyone. Even himself.

And had Zuko been a little more awake, he might have known to worry at her deadly quiet, before Azula bit out, "Go to _sleep_."

He fell asleep breathing the smoky scent of her hair. It made him think of fire burning on a starlit beach, of sitting on the cobwebbed porch of this empty house, holding on to all that remained of the life he'd known before. Of his sister, come to join him in his loneliness…

* * *

Moonlight still cast the shadow of windowpanes over the siblings like the bars of a cage, when Azula's eyes sprang open. The abruptness of her waking betrayed that she had not been sleeping at all, and she disentangled herself from the unconscious form of her brother to climb from the crimson sheets.

Azula took five halting steps into the dusty room before she succeeded in tying the sash of her robe with shaking hands, so tightly she could barely breathe. It wasn't nearly tight enough. Her jaw clenched to keep from screaming, and she didn't look back. Not yet.

She had done worse than this, she reminded herself. She had done worse, and lived. She would survive this too.

The only question now, was whether Zuko would.

Azula slowly turned, and her eyes fell on him with a baleful glance. He lay on his back, long hair spread behind him on the pillow. Half-covered by the faded silk sheets, his chest rose and fell with each breath, and the arm nearest her still reached for where she'd lain. He looked every bit as secure and content as she had imagined him, these four years she lost as his prisoner.

He'd taken everything from her. He would never **stop** taking from her. And Azula recalled his unthinking admission. What she'd wrung from him, in a moment of carelessness. She knew it. _She knew it_.

Her mouth bent into something resembling a grimace, and her sight blurred with tears. She clenched her hands into fists to forget how Zuko tried to hold them, when she panicked. He was just trying to save his own worthless life, she told herself, bitterly. _It had nothing to do with you. It never did_.

Azula had to look down before she realized she had drawn her fists to her chest, as if to shield herself from a blow. Her eyes closed against the shame of it, she turned from him and let down her arms in one swift motion. She limped the last few steps to her mother's writing desk against the paneled wall opposite the windows and the wardrobe gutted by her fire, cursing her sprained ankle, and seated herself before it.

She had to take several deep breaths with head clutched in hands before she composed herself enough to retrieve sheets of paper and brush, and a dried up old inkwell, from beneath the hinged panel of the small desk. Gritting her teeth at yet one more reminder of what she'd been reduced to, Azula spat twice into the inkwell, and spread the moisture around with the brush.

She smoothed the paper with her hands and printed four characters down the length of it. They did not satisfy her, and she crumpled the paper and wrote them again. And again, and again, and —

Finally, she stood from the finely carved chair, her message clutched firmly in hand. She circled the canopy bed before a cool breeze off the ocean ruffled her hair, and Azula looked over to catch a glint of moonlight off pearl from the folds of Zuko's discarded vest.

It was the pearl dagger, she realized, taking a few halting steps closer to kneel down beside the charred cloth. The dagger their uncle gave Zuko from his abortive conquest of Ba Sing Se. How much she coveted this once, Azula recalled. But he never meant it for her. And she contemplated putting it to a use he never intended.

Her fingers closed around the hilt…


	8. Wake

The Fire Princess staggered the last few steps to the water's edge before she dropped to her knees, biting back a sharp cry of pain when her left ankle gave out again. White surf slid over her fingers, buried in the ashy sands, and soaked the knees of the cut-off pants she'd taken, along with a simple brown tunic, from the servants' quarters.

_If you just thought to look there first, he might never have found you_. And Azula chided herself for considering it. She was not **Zuko**, to dwell on such pointless regrets.

The house still loomed behind her, a silent spectator to her failure. She couldn't stay here, she knew. It wasn't safe.

But she didn't have to be an astronomer to know either that the moon had sunk noticeably closer to the horizon, in just the time it took her to descend the path from the house to the ruined pier that marked their family beach. She moved too slowly over land, and would be nearly useless against any patrols she encountered, until her ankle started to mend.

What she really needed was a boat, Azula considered, glaring down at the waves that drew back into the surging sea to leave her hands sunk in wet sand. But Zuko was sure to have locked down the harbor, and any vessel she could steal from a private pier would be too small to get her farther than the next island.

It was hard to guess which motive would be uppermost in his mind, the desire to keep her escape a secret or the need to enlist aid in tracking her down. He might have alerted adjoining islands, or at least their domestic forces, to her flight. Given how terrible Zuko was at keeping secrets, that was the assumption she'd have to go with.

Besides, he had that traitor Mai with him. Probably right here on the island, if his reaction to her misleading threat was any indication. She would know which of the noble houses Azula was likeliest to turn to for support. She was aware, if only to a limited extent, of the network of allies and economy of favors the crown princess enjoyed at the height of her power. Mai just might know enough to guess the rest, and she and Zuko had had four years to subvert what Azula built.

It was impossible to know who she could trust… No, that wasn't true. There was one person she could trust. But how to get to her?

And Azula thought back to another summer on this beach, when the sun hung high in the sky, and Father shut himself up in his study to write a letter to someone in the capital, and Uncle fell asleep in the deck chair, his snores loud enough to be just barely audible even down on the beach. Lu Ten trained in the courtyard, and didn't like to be watched by little girls he had no time for. Mother helped Zuko repair the sandcastle Azula knocked down.

She couldn't remember whether she'd been put in time-out for that or not. Sometimes Ursa just didn't bother anymore. Either way, she was thoroughly ignored, and thoroughly bored. So when Azula slunk behind black rocks that crept nearly to the water's edge, and didn't hear her mother demand she come back, she decided to do some exploring.

She uncovered a lot of interesting places that afternoon, the most relevant of which to her current situation was a sheltered little cove carved out of the rocks by the currents, and shaded by palm trees. There was a ship at anchor there with its sails let down, and Azula was not so young she didn't know that boats that big were only supposed to be kept in the harbor.

Azula thought the oddly dressed people on it must be hiding something, and wanted to sneak aboard and see what it was. But she went home instead, afraid she might have been missed by now. She hadn't.

She asked Father about what she'd seen after, since unlike her mother, he encouraged Azula to be curious and find answers for herself. So she was understandably surprised when he started yelling at her, and only stopped when she tearfully protested she hadn't gone anywhere near the ship. And that was how, after Ozai snapped at her to stop crying, Azula first learned what a smuggler was.

She later discovered her father sometimes employed smugglers as sources of information he couldn't obtain through more official channels, in exchange for turning a blind eye to their black market dealings. So it was likely the cove was still there, and left largely alone by the domestic forces…

Without a backward glance, Azula climbed to her feet and walked resolutely into the waves. They threw her back up on the beach twice before she succeeded in forcing her way through to the calmer waters beyond. She swam for the cove with swift, sure strokes, watching moonlight glint in the rippling black. Azula hated swimming, though Father had been adamant she learn. It was fortunate he insisted, since this proved a much better alternative to walking, at the moment.

She saw lights bobbing among the rocks on the shore once, and stopped swimming, holding her breath and sinking deeper until only her eyes and forehead remained above the water. But the lights moved on without pausing, and Azula supposed they didn't see her dark head rise and fall with the waves.

She reached the entrance to the cove without further incident, and sighted the black hull of a ship inside, though it was not the one she spied as a young girl. _Finally, something goes right_, she thought — too soon, it seemed, to be safely relieved. A rip current from the mouth of the cove caught her. Azula gasped, and almost screamed, at the speed with which it dragged her out to sea.

Azula fought a losing battle against the current for several desperate seconds. Her limbs began to ache fiercely, before she remembered these were typically narrow. She cut diagonally in the direction of the shore, and escaped the pull, her teeth chattering, to begin the long swim back toward the rocks that framed the cove. Even with the waves at her back, her muscles protested with every stroke. And she was cold. _Actually_ cold. That shouldn't happen, unless she pushed herself too far.

Her eyes widened when she drew near enough to notice lamps light along the deck — and the silent hulk of the ship clear the harsh rocks at the mouth of the cove. It was already turning, and wouldn't pass her where she bobbed on the waves. And it occurred to her this was as good a time as any to test something she'd always wondered…

Azula took a deep breath, and dove beneath the waves. She held her arms in line with her head, and laid one hand on top of the other, fingers pointed to streamline her form. She ignited jets of blue flame at her heels.

The fire didn't catch, of course, but wasn't immediately extinguished either. And heat enough to flash-boil the water at her feet turned out to be more than sufficient to propel her toward the ship. Azula cut the jets just before she shot under the prow, and came up on the other side, gasping for air when she broke the water's surface.

The astonished shouts of the sailors on board just reached her where she tread water below. Her fire burned underwater. An irrepressible smirk broke over her face. "Still got it," Azula whispered.

She craned her neck to get a better look at the passing ship as she swam closer. Azula recognized the triangular sails from pictures in the royal archives, even if they were a neutral black now. A Fire Nation boom, one of her great-great-grandfather's ships from the last Age of Exploration. He authored this particular design himself. That it was still sea-worthy two centuries later was testament to the quality of Fire Nation craftsmanship.

And even if it had been … repurposed since, Azula knew this boom had to have a gun deck. Smugglers might have ditched the cannons for greater speed, but they could not have dispensed with the gun deck. She waited until the boat leaned toward her with the next breaking wave to cut across its wake and scramble up the wooden side. Using the odd ledge and limber hole for hand- and footholds, she climbed quickly to one of the gun ports and swung herself inside, before the ship could lean again and throw her off.

The cannons were gone, and there was nothing but warped wood planks to break Azula's fall. She sucked in a quick breath to keep from crying out when she landed on her burned forearm, and climbed stiffly to her feet, silently cursing her brother.

This open area of the gun deck was separate from the crew quarters, and empty of people as well, fortunately. There was no point to it without cannons anyway, and it seemed most of the hands had been drawn to the weather deck by her little light show. She could hear them arguing vigorously right over her head as to what it was they'd just seen. A few said it was some phosphorescent species of fish washed up from the lightless depths. Older sailors insisted no fish moved that fast, and it was a sea monster.

_Only half-right_, Azula thought bitterly.

She brought two fingers to her stomach, and then swept her arm out, streaming heat from her core to the deck. The continuous motion evaporated the trail of water left by her dripping clothes, as Azula stumbled sideways past wood pillars, nets, and coiled ropes toward the hatch in the middle of the long, moonlit room.

Practically falling on it when she reached for the handle, Azula pried the hatch open, and paused when she was greeted with an impenetrable dark. Igniting an azure flame in her hand, she lowered her arm into the hatch to reveal open stairs so steep they might be more accurately described as a ladder. She climbed down these backwards, careful to close the hatch behind her. She took the stairs one at a time, feeling her way down in the absolute black. And her arms still shook when she hooked them through the slats, to support the weight her sprained ankle couldn't.

Or maybe that was just the violence of her shivering. She couldn't seem to stop…

Azula climbed down into the hold of the ship, and slowly turned, lighting the flame in her palm again. Crates and burlap sacks in various stages of spilling littered the spaces between ugly square pillars. Vertical support beams along the nearest side of the ship curved to the ceiling some distance above her head, reminding her bizarrely of ribs. And she tried to shake the impression of having been swallowed by some great whale.

Her halting steps took her past the stores and provisions. She wound her way between a few clumps of crates, adjusting her already unsteady gait for the rolling of the ship, falling against the crates when she didn't entirely succeed. Azula finally sat down with her back against a wood pillar, beside a long crate of halberds. The smugglers would have no reason to come for these unless they arrived at their destination, or encountered something Azula needed to know about anyway.

She extinguished the flame in her hand, and folded her legs beneath her, drawing them closer for warmth. Azula held her injured left arm to her chest. Her fingers closed carefully over the hand-shaped burn, and for a long moment, the only sounds were her shivering, the groaning of the ship, the lapping of the waves.

Concentrating intently, Azula exhaled blue flame from her mouth to warm herself. The first time, it cast an eerie light on the hard edges of the crates packed loosely around her. And the second. The third time, it fell on white skin and crimson robes.

Azula startled, and the light died with her breath. But she could still feel it there in the oppressive dark, like a physical presence. She knew that face. This was only what Azula feared, from the moment she realized what she and — and Zuko —

Would her mother **not**_ her mother_ know? It always seemed to know things she shouldn't, because they happened after she left. It knew them because Azula knew them. And it was a product of her mind.

What would it say? What would it do? Would it cease the false kindness, be as hateful as she'd been in life? Azula didn't know if she could take that, after everything…

She chided herself. She had lived with it for this long, she could endure a little longer. She would find her real mother, and these visions would stop.

They had to.

That was why Azula didn't try to run or even make a sound when she felt its approach in the darkness, or when it knelt beside her. There was nowhere she could run from this. She knew that now. It lived inside her, and it wouldn't stop until she _made_ it.

Its soft arms closed around her shoulders, with none of the tension Azula always felt in the real Ursa, when she was obligated to either hug her daughter, or admit she didn't want to. Even if she chose the first, Azula knew. She always knew. It laid its head against her sopping hair.

"Happy birthday," it whispered.

And Azula started to cry.

* * *

The Fire Lord woke to the fluttering of paper.

He raised a heavy hand to his face, joints screaming in protest at the movement, and felt the hard ridge of a throbbing cut under his right eye. His cheek was stiff with what he guessed must be dried blood. Zuko blinked in the harsh light of day.

He slept past sunrise? What —

Zuko propped himself on an elbow. He turned to face the light that shone through the broken window panes … and cringed, clenching his teeth at the pain that knifed through him. He clutched his right side, his fingers brushed what he felt sure must be a spectacular bruise. Scratches and cuts, too many to number, stung along his back and shoulders, even his neck when he flexed it.

This wasn't his bed, he realized slowly, but that was his pearl dagger. Sunk halfway to the hilt in the dusty wood of the nightstand to his right, it fixed a note to the serpentine form of a dragon, expertly stained into the curve of the table. He reached stiffly over to pull the knife free, letting it fall with a clatter to the floor strewn with broken glass beside him. He held up the note for inspection.

It was his sister's script. As many letters as she sent, Zuko would like to think he recognized it. Even if she wrote a different four characters this time, and her meaning was altogether changed…

_Don't follow me_.

But he _had_ followed her, he remembered at last. He followed her here. Azula was here…

And Zuko looked up as if he half-expected to find her waiting, like the time before. His eyes lighted instead on the wardrobe, charred black and crumbling. Gutted by her fire —

_Azula stood before the open wardrobe. Her hair hung wetly down her back. Her left hand gripped the back of his neck. Two fingers of her right thrust into the hollow of his jaw. Her body pressed close against him. She pressed a soft kiss to the side of his neck…_

She had — He did — They…

Oh gods, **no**.

The enormity of their crime settled like a weight on Zuko's chest, so heavy he could barely breathe. He pushed himself quickly upright, looking frantically about the ruined bedroom — inches deep in dust, their mother's room — as if for anything to prove it didn't happen.

His eyes fell on the writing desk beside the open door, and the several pieces of paper crumpled and discarded at the foot of it. Zuko darted across the width of bed and its twisted sheets, only checked in his haste by the need to refasten his pants. He blushed miserably when he stopped to do it, and lighted to the dusty floor as if from a bed of hot coals and not of silk.

He stooped to grab the nearest crumpled note. And Zuko tore it open like it held some priceless secret, his mismatched eyes quickly scanning the length of the page. And the next page, and the next…

He didn't know what he thought to find printed there. It's not your fault? You imagined it? Just one more of her lies? But he found what he should have known he'd find, if he had been paying any kind of attention. The same four characters, written almost a dozen times in her elegant hand.

They all looked exactly the same.

And still Zuko kept reading in growing desperation, as if this time, at last, she'd have something else to say to him. To what they did. The hands that held her letters shook. The contents blurred before he finished, and his eyes began to sting…

_Her tears fell on his chest, so hot they almost scalded_.

Four characters, that communicated so much more than their surface meaning. That she wanted nothing to do with him. That he had violated what little trust remained between them. That she was still crazy, and he just made her worse.

Zuko took a quick step back, as if a staggering gap had opened before him, and he couldn't retreat from it fast enough. He didn't realize he was backing toward the bed, until he hit the edge of it and sat abruptly. And Zuko folded with despair, her letters crumpled in his hands, fists pressed against his forehead.

He bared his teeth in something hideously like a grin, except it betrayed exactly the opposite sentiment. His jaw clenched so hard it ached, his stomach tied itself in knots with guilt. The _guilt_… His breath hitched, and a low sob burst from him, when his pain grew too keen to be denied expression.

He had never once felt so alone.

Azula could not have achieved a more perfect revenge if she planned it. He knew she blamed him for the loss of her friends at the Boiling Rock, Mom's rejection. And with this one act, she had effectively isolated him. There was no one he could turn to for support, no one he could tell. If anyone found out, it would ruin him. And probably also his family. His_ family_… Zuko shuddered with remorse.

There was only one person he could talk to about this, one person through whom he could begin to make it right. And she had left him wounded and forsaken. Even when he woke up to his exile, even when he woke up to his scar, she was still there. She still had something left to say to him, even if it was only to goad him, to tease him, to lie to him…

_You never should have turned your back on me_.

And Zuko wept for what they did. For what they lost, and what they never had.

Oh Agni. Would she ever be his sister again?

* * *

He found the robe abandoned in a cobwebbed corner of one of the servants' rooms downstairs. Azula was nowhere in the house, he eventually determined. He could have guessed she wouldn't be, but Zuko looked anyway. He didn't know what else to do.

The staggered footprints he followed outside led to the water's edge, like she had walked straight into the sea. She didn't even bother trying to cover her progress, perhaps remembering what a competent tracker he was. Or maybe she hoped he'd give her up for drowned.

But Zuko knew better. Even if she hated swimming, she was as good at it as she was at anything else. She might even make the nearest island, if she didn't simply steal a boat instead. He had to admit it was a smart move. With her sprained ankle, she would have a hard time outrunning or fighting her way past patrols on land. But no one would expect a firebender to take to the water…

Zuko followed pristine, white-paved boulevards to Ember Island's interior and the town proper, ringed by the private estates, beaches, and marketplaces that crowded the waterfront. He drew a lot of stares as he walked, and couldn't immediately decide whether this was because of his disheveled appearance or some recognition of their Fire Lord on the part of his people. He had lacked the supplies to clean the cut on his face, his hair hung loosely about his shoulders, still mussed from sleep, and his shirt and overvest were torn and singed, respectively. This would have been enough to make anyone remark him.

But Zuko grew increasingly uneasy, as he neared the interior of the island, to see more and more imperial firebenders from the royal procession patrolling the streets in groups of anywhere from two to five, their distinctive uniforms betraying their purpose quite readily, despite their lack of arms. Their search was clearly suspended, and they seemed to be awaiting further orders. They did not approach Zuko for these, but merely bowed from the waist to him as he passed, their hands held fist-to-palm in the national salute.

He should have guessed Mai would divert every available member of their retinue to the search. It was the instinct of a wife and mother, to want to keep her family safe. Unfortunately, the very visible presence of his household troops — who had no doubt been knocking on doors, enforcing the curfew, and searching citizens' homes and businesses all night — now made it impossible to conceal either his presence here or Azula's escape.

A few imperial firebenders might have been written off as a generous offer of assistance to the asylum, in tracking down the several escaped inmates. This was probably Kwan's original intent. It was already rumored among the island's citizens that Zuko contributed a detachment of his household troops to the asylum, for his sister's care and protection. But the presence of this many soldiers could only indicate a matter of personal importance to the Fire Lord. Such as the disappearance of what his rivals liked to call — behind his back, of course — a "high-profile political prisoner."

This was about to get ugly, fast.

It was with this thought in mind that Zuko stopped, and tensed reflexively at the approach of a crimson clad figure, who emerged from the byway between two identical houses, trimmed red and gold, before he recognized it as the captain of his palace guard. The stout man halted yards distant from him, and executed a polite bow in greeting. The three imperial firebenders who flanked him did likewise, inclining the three-pronged crests of their helmets to Zuko.

"Fire Lord, we're heartened by your safe return!" the captain intoned, still holding his bow while his subordinates looked a little irritably at him, as if wondering how much longer they too had to stand like this. "We carried out your orders in your absence, but … I am afraid we weren't able to locate the princess." And he risked a glance up at the disheveled Zuko, clearly wondering whether his sovereign met with more success.

"Where are — my wife and son?" Zuko avoided the implied question rather clumsily. But his mind was too crowded with Azula, and what they did, and why _why_ did he do it, to really hold up his end of a conversation.

The captain glanced up again before standing hesitantly from his bow, much to the relief of his fellows. "We took them to the central inn, as you ordered," he reminded Zuko, his heavy brows drawn with concern that his Lord would need reminding. "They have remained there in safety, with a detachment of guards."

"Good, good," Zuko absently replied, watching a few servants from his retinue rush up behind the guards with a palanquin, not really seeing any of it. "Have them meet me at the skyport, and send someone for our luggage. We should return as soon as possible to the capital," his voice relayed the order as if from somewhere outside of him.

He moved to ascend the palanquin when his sweating servants set it down beside them. The late summer sun cast the shadows of palm trees, thatch umbrellas, and red tile roofs almost straight downward onto the white stone. He added over his shoulder, "And get me a few messenger hawks, paper, ink and brushes. I have orders and summons to dispatch."

"It will be done, of course, but …" Zuko stopped when his silence registered, and turned to regard the captain. "My Lord, please forgive me for saying so. It might be best to reassure the Lady Mai of your safety first. She has become," he paused tactfully, "_difficult_ to contain, especially since sunrise…"

Of course, Zuko realized. She knew he rose with the sun. When morning broke and he didn't come back, Mai probably thought he was lying dead in a ditch, instead of — Oh Agni, he did a terrible thing. He was a terrible person. She deserved better. She deserved so much better —

_Don't think about it_, he told himself, a little desperately. This wasn't over. This was just beginning. He **had** to focus. He had to right the wrong.

"Fire Lord Zuko, are you alright?" The captain fixed black eyes on him in apparent worry. "Should I send for a doctor?"

"No," Zuko replied at last, and lifted his hand in a quelling gesture. "My injuries are superficial, they will keep. Take me to Lady Mai and the prince," he amended, climbing into the palanquin. "Of course, I will rejoin my family before we depart."

"Very good, sir," the captain confirmed, with a nod to his palanquin bearers. These last lifted him smoothly, and conveyed him toward the inn that housed his family at a steady pace. And Zuko closed himself away behind the gauzy curtains of his palanquin.

The ride passed swiftly enough, with such regrets as he had for company, and he was discreetly admitted to the service entrance of the stately old inn, while the captain and his accompanying guards took up watch outside the door. He wanted to tell them these precautions weren't necessary, that Azula was gone and likelier than not to put as much distance between herself and Zuko as possible. But then he'd have to explain how he knew…

Zuko followed the directions the captain gave him down halls of cherry wood panels and elaborate floor runners embroidered with dragons. Not that he particularly needed directions, since as it turned out, there were imperial firebenders posted at regular intervals along the route to the rooms set aside for Mai and Lu Ten.

Even without their distinctive uniforms (Mai's idea, surely) they were fairly obvious. Not the least because they each bowed to him as he passed. And Zuko felt a glimmer of annoyance at their lack of foresight. More accustomed to the imperial palace, where they had the numbers and the prerogative to patrol the halls in force, they had not considered the need for stealth in such an unusual circumstance. It did not seem to occur to any of them that they were practically marking a path straight to his family.

Azula would have found them easily, if she decided to make good on her threat. A part of him was surprised she hadn't, after what he did to her. And too late, Zuko realized, as he should have done when she made the threat, that Azula might have lied to distract him. He had been on the receiving end of genuine threats from her before, and she was usually much more definite. But he let her get under his skin just like he always did, and now —

He paused with his hand upon the doorjamb of the paper panels that opened onto Mai's room. Zuko would not be any more ready to face her if he waited five years outside this door, than if he waited five minutes. And to let her fear any longer for someone as undeserving as him would be almost as cruel as what he'd already done. Even if the husband Mai thought she knew would never truly come back to her…

Zuko closed his eyes against the thought, and the tears of remorse that threatened. He took a deep breath, and entered the room.

Mai sat in a stiff-backed wooden chair to the left of the door, her gaze downcast and brooding. She leaned forward in visible tension, dagger clutched in hand and ready to let fly. Her head shot up at his entrance. It took a moment for her husband's safe return to register, and in that moment, there was murder in her eyes. Zuko stopped short beside a low-slung dresser, adjacent the neatly made four-post bed that she obviously hadn't slept in.

Such naked relief flashed across her usually impassive face as cut him to the core, and Mai leapt to her feet without a word of greeting. The dagger fell from her hand, forgotten, to stick in the stained wood floor, when she embraced him as fiercely as she'd ever done.

They collided so hard it took his breath away, and Zuko winced with the pain of his injuries before he could return her hug. Mai didn't seem to notice, and he was glad of it. His hand closed over the loose black hair that spilled down her white neck and bare shoulders. He breathed the scent of that subtle perfume that smelled like nothing else he knew but her.

Oh Agni, he missed her in his arms already. He didn't know how much longer he would have this.

Mai didn't cry, but he could still feel her draw taut with the depth of her emotion. Just what emotion that was proved harder to pin down, when she pushed away from him a second later. Her black brows furrowed so sharply he could actually see them beneath the thick ridge of her bangs for once. "_Stupid!_" Mai bit out. "Where **were** you? How could you go _after her _**alone?**"

But the considerations that had seemed so pressing last night looked horribly inadequate in light of what he'd done, and Zuko couldn't answer her. He couldn't even answer himself.

"You don't leave **any word**, you didn't even _think_ —" she choked out, almost incoherent with rage. Zuko could not remember the last time he'd seen her this angry. If he'd _ever_ seen her this angry. Her hands actually shook, and he reached for her arm to try to calm her, but she threw him off.

"What if you were _hurt?_" Mai demanded, her hands clenched into fists. "What if you were **killed?!**" Her low voice broke, and his heart along with it. "What would I _do? _And Lu Ten —" She stopped, and looked down with jaw set and tears budding at the corners of her eyes.

Zuko took the opening to grasp her elbows, only for her to grip his in turn. And they held like that for a second, bent and half-grappling with each other, until Mai raised her head to confront him. "You're a **father** now, Zuko!" she said tightly, her narrow eyes fixed on him with such reproach that he almost flinched from her. "You _can't_ treat your life so **cheaply!**"

"I'm sorry," he said hoarsely. And she didn't know just how sorry he was.

Her harsh gaze still softened at his poor apology, and lingered on his face. Mai relaxed her grip on his arms and took a step closer, closing the distance between them to rest her hands on his chest. "I don't want you to be sorry," she stressed at last. "I just want you to be _safe_."

Zuko had to look away from the openness of her concern. It was more than he deserved.

Mai ran her fingertips along the ridge of the bloody cut that marred his cheek, and Zuko closed his eyes at her touch. "What did she do to you?" his wife demanded gently, with an unaccustomed sadness. "Oh gods, your _clothes_…"

And his eyes snapped open, anticipation coming too late. There was no time to prevent her before Mai stepped around him, sliding the loose shirt and charred vest from his shoulders in one smooth motion, born of their years of intimacy. He felt her stop at the sight that greeted her, the ruined garments falling from her hands.

He half-turned to face her, breaking contact when she reached out almost fearfully to trace the the raw scratches that crossed his back and shoulders. And he remembered, to his shame, that her nails had left marks like this once or twice before, when their lovemaking got a little out of hand. Like after that first attempt on Zuko's life, just weeks after his coronation. Or their wedding night.

His turn seemed to break her study, her eyes sought his in desperation. He thought that even white as she was, Mai paled when she began to realize what this meant. And Zuko faced her fully, even if he couldn't face the question in her eyes. "Mai…" he tried weakly, with no idea what he could say.

But the look on his face told her everything she needed to know.

Her name from his mouth stung her visibly, and Mai slapped him swiftly across his scar. Hard enough that even his damaged nerves registered the blow, though it was the least of his pain. Zuko didn't try to stop her when she walked out the door — her bare arms wrapped around herself as if holding in a storm — and slid it shut behind her with an awful finality.

He didn't try to stop her, for the glimpse he caught of her face before she turned away. The tears that finally spilled at this, his last betrayal.

Zuko thought she hadn't gone far. He could almost swear he heard her crying quietly, just outside the door. He didn't even know what that would sound like. He had never seen her cry before today. She had not let herself care about anyone or anything, until him. Until she let him in. And this was how he repaid her.

He longed to take her in his arms again, to tell her a hundred times how sorry he was. To soothe the hurt that he inflicted. The need was so strong, to deny it was like a physical ache. But he did deny it. Because Zuko knew he was the last person she wanted right now.

Instead, he showed his back to the door, before he could do something else that they would both regret. He pressed a hand to the bruise on his side, and his gaze fell on the dagger Mai dropped beside the chair where she sat waiting, probably for hours. Waiting for him.

_That first glimpse of her face was like a dagger to the heart_.

He thought that he should probably cry. But he had no more tears to spend, and Zuko closed his eyes instead.

* * *

Azula opened her eyes, at muted voices in the darkness of the hold. The first departure from the sounds of seafaring that had become so much background noise to her over the last few days. She was sure she wouldn't even know it had been four days, if she were not a firebender and attuned to the rising and setting of the sun.

It had been so too in the asylum, when she managed to go long enough between sedations to feel the change. It only made her ache for freedom more. Her movements had been so restricted there, that she had not seen the sun since it rose on the day of Sozin's Comet. Even now that she was free, she still hadn't.

The pale imitation of lamplight threw the wood planks into soft relief, when its bearer drew closer. "I think it rolled over here," said the woman, and the edges of a white onion teetering on its swollen side materialized out of the dark. It had stopped right before the entrance to her loose enclosure among the stacks of crates.

Azula clambered to her feet, her sprained ankle wrapped tightly in rough canvas she cut from a shipment she uncovered nearby, and bound with cord. She had managed no more than to hop on it yet, despite alternating simple exercises to stretch and strengthen the injured joint with fitful sleep. She didn't know why she was so tired all the time, unless the sedatives still hadn't left her system. Gods damn it, as if she wasn't useless enough already with a sprained ankle…

The sudden intrusion left her no time to hide. She barely seized the opportunity to lay hold of the blade she had broken off one of the halberds, and secret it behind her back, before a figure emerged from behind the stack of wood crates to Azula's left and into her line of sight.

The lamplight revealed a dumpy woman roughly Azula's height and perhaps ten years her senior, whose pale skin and prematurely graying hair bound in a neat topknot clearly marked her as Fire Nation. She wore a simple brown dress that fell just past her knees, tied with a black apron, and Azula supposed she was a cook. She couldn't guess who else would waste time chasing down runaway onions anyway.

Azula fleetingly considered there was something familiar about her, but dismissed the thought as so much unnecessary distraction. The peasant stopped just short of the lost onion, and her wide eyes fixed on Azula. Azula stared back. A tense moment passed thus in silence, while a scowl cut Azula's brow and the blade cut into her palm.

And she waited.

Azula didn't mind waiting. She could be patient, when her goals demanded it. What she _did_ mind was being limited only to react. It was a weakness, leaving her vulnerable to the tangled motives and flawed decisions of small minds. And even if she was a people person, Azula could admit, if only grudgingly at last, that her anticipation was not perfect.

Better to act first, and assert early control of the situation. But she couldn't do that here, she didn't have enough information. She never had enough information anymore. It grated.

Even if Azula missed the change in the open expression of her intruder — and she didn't — the cue was fairly obvious when the cook let down the hand that held her lamp. Then she did something Azula didn't expect, kicking the white onion lightly so it rolled out of the aisle and toward Azula. And the cook took a step closer, entering the loose enclosure.

Azula still didn't hesitate when the other turned her back though, to yell behind her, "It caught under some crates! Give me a minute to fish it out." Her kitchen boy made a groan of impatience, and called back, "I'll take the rest upstairs, but don't tarry! You know how Lee gets when he has to wait for food!"

The cook probably didn't register this, when she turned back only for the stowaway to pin her with with a forearm to the collarbone against the crates beside them. Azula brought the blade quickly to a halt, a bare inch from her jugular. Her eyes narrowed, even as she congratulated herself on moving quietly enough to maintain some element of surprise. She probably looked ridiculous half-hopping on a injured ankle, but she was steady enough when she merely stood in place.

"That was either very kind of you, or very **stupid**," Azula said at last, her voice low and deadly. "Though in my experience, the two often coincide. Why did you do it?"

Her hostage appeared taken aback at the demand. Her stark brows shot up, like she couldn't believe Azula would look a gift ostrich horse in the mouth. She clearly had no idea who she was dealing with. "I want to help you," the woman carefully replied. Seeing at a glance that Azula didn't believe this, she added, "I've — I've been where you are before."

"Stowed away in the hold of a ship?" Azula demanded skeptically. Her blade didn't withdraw an inch, and neither would this woman, if she had any sense.

"No, I —" She stopped and looked on Azula with a new aspect, one the fugitive princess didn't recognize. She only knew she didn't like it. "I know you — you didn't do that — to yourself…" she trailed off, a little awkwardly.

Unaccustomed besides to servants looking directly at her, Azula had only just realized the cook's gray eyes tinged orange in the lamplight fell on something nearer at hand. Not the knife or her left hand that held it aloft, but her forearm, the one Zuko burned. The burn that had just begun to fade. The mark of violent hands upon her, the mark of her shame.

And Azula realized. That look was pity. Pity for something she thought they shared in common. The instinct to use it to her advantage warred with the desire to burn this peasant for presuming it.

Pragmatism won out. Barely.

"You shouldn't make assumptions about me," Azula warned harshly, her voice clipped with rage. But she was still careful to angle the knife precisely so the peasant would only feel the cold bite of its blunt end pressing into her skin, and not the sting of its blade. "It could end badly for you."

And the cook looked her straight in the face, in the eerie shadows of the lamp she held too low. As if the threat of the blade and its wielder emboldened her to speak. "Maybe so, Miss," the older woman replied, with remarkable steadiness of tone. "But the way I see it, there are only two ways this could end for you."

Her glare didn't falter and neither did her blade. But Azula made no interruption either, interested despite herself.

"Now you've been discovered, you _could_ kill me, and keep your secret just a little longer," the cook admitted. "But I would be missed sooner or later, and probably sooner. And we are at sea, with only so many places for you to hide."

Azula didn't bother making idle threats in rebuttal. Such as, that she could kill the crew off one by one. A ship this large needed multiple hands. Or that she might cow them into submission. She had to sleep sometime.

This woman wasn't an idiot. Azula could appreciate that.

"You said there were two ends," Azula reminded her casually, and pretended not to notice how her captive relaxed visibly at the acknowledgment, putting away her bravado like an ill-fitting shirt. "Complete your thought."

The cook took a deep breath. "Or," she said portentously, and Azula resisted the urge to roll her eyes, "you could hear what I propose."

She let the silence hang, considering. Azula didn't believe her intentions for a second, but she supposed she didn't have a lot of other options presently. And if nothing else, it might prove instructive to find out what this peasant meant to gain.

"Very well," Azula lightly replied, and held up the blade like a hand raised in greeting. She took two heavy steps back, and away from her avowed ally.

"Your move."

* * *

**Rating is upgraded to M, in accordance with the advice of several reviewers. Thanks again for your input on this, and many other aspects of the story. In several cases, your deep understanding of the source material, and the extent to which you pick up on foreshadowing and read between the lines etc. has impressed me. I didn't know just what to expect, delivering a twist like the one last chapter, but you got it by and large, and for that, I am grateful.**

**Special thanks as well to Meneldur and Attila1987, for some truly epic-length reviews. (In Meneldur's case, multiple reviews, in addition to outside correspondence on the latest chapter.) I also suspect I have Attila1987, and your recommendation of my fic on an Avatar forum, to thank for an increase in traffic, despite a long update. So thank you.**

**I also thought to take a few moments to answer some questions/observations posed in previous reviews, before I forget:**

******"I'm a bit confused by your depiction of the flashback of her nursing Zuko's fresh face scar … seeing her show Zuko sympathy regarding his scar and banishment at that time seemed a bit odd." Although the act itself of changing Zuko's bandage might seem sympathetic on the surface, I would argue Azula could (and did) have multiple motives for what she did there. For one thing, she wanted to see Zuko's scar up close, for herself. (As she mentions, she hasn't seen it.) **

******For another, it gives her a pretext to accomplish other ends, for example, being the one to tell him he's been banished and sent on a Snipe Hunt. Venting her frustration at what she perceives as his blindness and inadequacy. Offering to help him, in her own twisted way, in the form of advice that has let her thrive in a Deadly Decadent Court and a choice in his moment of despair. Why? Is she trying one last time (if rather ineptly) to connect with the brother she may never see again? Or is she only reluctant to lose the foil for all her achievements and her chief amusement, in laughing at his torment? Or could it be both? The world may never know. :)  
**

**"Zuko is unable to see that maybe HE is wrong, like when he thought 'Zuko wondered, distantly, if there was even more wrong with her than he knew.'" This may not come up in the story for some time, but this is actually Zuko wondering if there is something _physically_ as well as mentally wrong with her. And there is. Though whether that may be attributed to sedatives still in her system or the lingering effects of her starvation attempt remains to be seen.**

**"was this always your intended outcome with this story, or was there a catalyst that triggered it? Or perhaps even, was it an up in the air decision, and if so, what pushed you to the decision to turn it Zucest?" This was one of the tropes associated with Azula that I wished to deconstruct from the start, though I debated right up to the chapter itself whether or not to go through with it. This was sure to be a controversial development and would probably, I knew, lose me some (maybe even a lot) of readers.  
**

**My primary motive was this: As I mentioned last author's note, I've read a lot of Azula fanfiction. And I have yet to see one fic (outside maybe a single AU) seriously examine either how something like this might ever happen or the consequences of such an outcome. Not just on Zuko and Azula, and their already very unhealthy relationship, but on everyone connected to them, their nation and their world. (We start to see some of that fall out this chapter. And rest assured, we are going to be seeing a lot more in chapters to come.) **

**Two factors in particular make _post-series_ Zucest even trickier and more questionable than the base concept itself, and these are the obvious (and unprecedented) imbalance of power between a victorious Zuko and a defeated Azula, and Azula's mental state ... which did not come into play until the tail end of the show, just in time for Zuko to defeat her by proxy. What would it mean for him (for them both) in the long term? I decided this was a challenge I wanted to take on. I wanted the answers to these questions, to a lot of questions about post-series Azula. And I knew I couldn't be the only one. So I wrote it.**

**Anyway, thanks again for all your comments and questions. And please do leave a review.**


	9. Her Own Blood

**Updated at last, with an extra long chapter for your wait. Of course, there is a lot going on here, including a dream sequence. Let's just say, I hope italics don't hurt your eyes. :)**

**Thanks to my dear reviewers, and some answers for you: I don't have an account on** **avatarspiritdotnet**,** but I visit often to make use of their screenshot database. Mai was not aware of the depth of Zuko's problems with Azula, or of Ozai's abuse.**

**She was able to come to the conclusion she did based on a number of factors. First, while Zuko has scratches on his back, she would have seen that there were no corresponding tears in his shirt or overvest, meaning he was shirtless when Azula injured him, which is already a little off. Second, though I didn't mention this explicitly in Chapter 8, he had puncture marks where Azula dug her nails into his back in Chapter 7, and this is not something she could have accomplished from behind. She would have had to have her arms around him to get that kind of leverage. And, as mentioned, Mai knows what these kind of scratches look like, because she has inflicted them on Zuko once or twice herself.**

**But what really clinched it was the look on his face. Notice, Mai looks to him for an explanation, desperate to believe this is other than what it seems. But Zuko is a terrible liar, and when confronted with the evidence of his crime, he cannot keep his guilt from showing. He doesn't need to say a word. Mai can read him well enough to guess what happened, even if she doesn't know the particulars. And she will have those too, in her own time.**

**Iroh will make an appearance next chapter, but he will not interact directly with Azula until later in the story, when I can develop their relationship at more length.**

**As always, special thanks to Meneldur, whose input on the first third of the chapter improved it substantially and helped lay the groundwork for future developments. Very glad to have you on board :)**

**I think that's all I wanted to say, except that _Legend of Korra_ debuts today (if I'm not mistaken) so I hope you all enjoy. And, you know, still find some time to read me too :)**

**Best wishes for a happy LOK day!**

* * *

Zuko sat upon the Burning Throne in full regalia, with his hands laid on his knees and gaze fixed straight ahead. A wall of flame burned before him, casting the corkscrew pillars and dragon frieze at his back into soft relief.

Sometimes he thought he heard a voice from the crackling of the flames. Zuko knew whose voice it was. The mocking voice that whispered in his heart, that spoke to him from the unquiet dark. Zuko knew whose voice it was, just not what it told.

_Her lips moved silently, forming the same word over and over again_.

It had been a week since they returned to the palace. And Mai only spoke to him once, to demand what exactly it was that he'd done. Zuko knew she could guess well enough from the marks on his back, her reaction alone had confirmed that. And even if he had the skill to lie, Zuko didn't have the heart for it.

Still, he hadn't meant to tell her everything, intended to give her only the barest outline of that night. But the more Mai just stood there with arms crossed and blank eyes fixed on him, like he was an insect she pinned to the wall with one of her knives, the more he found himself revealing.

It was the single most painful conversation he had ever had. A hundred times worse than apologizing to Uncle for his betrayal at Ba Sing Se, with every expectation of being rejected. There was no tearful hug waiting for him at the end of his confession. She didn't offer any comment on his crime. Mai didn't even ask why he'd done it. Maybe she didn't want to know.

Sometimes Zuko thought he didn't want to know. Other times, it was all he wanted. That, and for this never to have happened. To have his honor back. For his wife not to hate him. To stop hating himself.

Zuko wanted a lot of things he would probably never gain. And there was still no sign of his sister.

He lifted his lockdown of the harbor on Ember Island, after diligent inspections of every outgoing ship yielded nothing but bitter complaints from the merchants. The strange part was, Azula didn't seem to have stolen a boat either. All craft were accounted for. And with no real idea how she escaped the island, for she had not been found on land either, Zuko had no leads to follow. She must have found another way, he told himself. He couldn't believe she was dead.

But his duties to the realm and the need for secrecy confined him to such fruitless speculations. He could not search for Azula himself without acknowledging the threat, and drawing down enormous repercussions on both their heads. Zuko wondered too how much part his own guilt played in it. What would he say to her, if he saw her again? Could he even look her in the face without remembering all too vividly what they did? As if he could ever forget…

So he was forced to wait for any word from the officials of outlying islands and Fire Nation colonies, whom he had discreetly notified of her fugitive status. And word from his friends. So far, only Sokka and Suki had sent any reply to his summons. He had no idea if Aang, Katara, and Toph would show up, or if they even received his message.

Of course, Zuko was not short of unwanted company and demands for his attention in the meantime. With the abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion of his meetings with the Ember Island opposition, Zuko had resorted to granting advisory positions on his personal council to two of his most vocal detractors.

He knew it was a mere stalling tactic. Their resentment was bound to flare up again when they realized their input would not effect change in his policies. But at least this way, he could physically remove them from their base of support and keep them close for ease of surveillance.

This was Mai's suggestion, of course, from before he started negotiations. He already missed her reluctant advice. Zuko sighed, dropping his gaze to the base of the flames.

He had not broached the subject of Azula's escape with his council, wanting more time to consider the political implications, and shore himself against them. Though he was sure the Ember Island faction must already know of it. How long they'd keep their mouths shut was anybody's guess. Zuko just couldn't believe they hadn't tried to blackmail him yet.

As if the waiting weren't bad enough, this uncertainty made the already tedious business of running a nation even more difficult to concentrate on. Zuko had had to ask his ministers and advisers to repeat themselves more than once in the last few days, because he was too busy considering how many of them already knew, and why didn't they say anything, and did that look they gave him mean what he thought it meant to even catch what they said.

Sometimes Zuko wondered if this was how Azula felt, descending into paranoia in the run-up to her coronation. Sometimes Zuko wondered if he was going crazy. He just wished his friends would get here. At least then, he would know someone meant to help him, even if he could never tell them. Even if they would never understand.

At least then, he wouldn't be alone.

As if cued to his thoughts, the curtains parted at the far end of the cavernous throne room. Indistinct through the flicker of flames, the dark forms of two imperial firebenders entered to admit his latest appointment, an Earth Kingdom ambassador come to discuss the policing of trade routes overseas, if he recalled correctly. Zuko let the flames in the trough fall low, to greet the ambassador and two accompanying aides when they approached and knelt before the Burning Throne.

And the words of greeting stuck in his throat, when he saw who led the delegation. It was General How of the Council of Five.

The general stood without being acknowledged, in violation of protocol. His party followed suit. "My apologies for preempting this meeting, Fire Lord Zuko," How began coldly, sounding anything but sorry. "But this seemed the most expedient way to address an issue that concerns both our peoples."

Zuko could only stare in dumb amazement at the bearded general, and a venerable old man clad in robes of ochre trimmed with gold, feeling like he had been ambushed. This suspicion was not eased by the sight of a lantern-jawed former Dai Li, whom Zuko hadn't laid eyes on since the peace summit three years ago. The same man who publicly questioned Azula's exemption from trial. His presence here, now, could not be a coincidence.

"What is this?" the white-faced Fire Lord managed at last, though he could certainly guess. "I don't understand —"

How's harsh brows pinched in obvious impatience, and the Dai Li standing at his right shoulder exchanged a glance with his mustachioed elder at the left. The general bit out, "I am speaking, of course, of your sister's **escape** from the asylum that had overseen her care."

Zuko's eyes shot wide open, but he made no reply. What could he possibly say to this? What should he say… "Am I right in guessing you have not recaptured her?" the general prompted, frowning at his silence.

"No," Zuko said tightly. His voice barely broke a whisper. How could they know already? Ships couldn't even reach Ba Sing Se from Ember Island in a week! And he closed the post office, forbade all communications from the island…

He hadn't expected the silence to hold indefinitely, but damned if he expected it to break this soon.

"Then I suppose you might consider this a courtesy call," How was saying, before Zuko paid him mind again. His brow knit with confusion, but the general only fixed him with an implacable glare. When he spoke next, it was with the formal cadence of a proclamation.

"By authority of the Earth King, we have come to inform you that your sister, the princess Azula, has been tried _in absentia_ and convicted of war crimes. She has been sentenced to death."

Adrenaline shot through his veins like a fork of lightning at that word. And Zuko leapt to his feet before the throne seat, as if the attack had been against his own person. "You can't _do_ that!" he snapped, equal parts desperate and incensed. "We had an agreement! She wouldn't be tried until she was declared **sane**, and she _hasn't_ been!" His hand swept a sharp arc, better to reject the notion.

"The princess violated the terms of the agreement made on her behalf when she escaped," How countered coolly, the studs on his olive tunic gleaming in the firelight. "My kingdom is no longer bound by it."

"But she wasn't aware of the terms —" Zuko said heatedly, his fists clenched as if ready for a fight.

"Then it is _your _fault for not informing her, not ours."

_Your fault_. The words stung worse than the earthbender general could possibly know. Maybe that was why Zuko unwisely replied, "Bullshit!" He was too angry by now to take any satisfaction when How's companions flinched at the expletive, and the general scowled in offense. "She has a **right** to appear at her _own trial! _**I** have a right to see she's represented!"

When How's stony expression didn't yield, Zuko found a new focus for his mounting rage, and one much closer at hand. "This concerns _my_ nation as **much** as yours!" he barked down at the general. "How **dare** you hide these proceedings from me?"

That did it. A vein bulged so prominently on How's forehead that Zuko saw it even in the firelight. But his silent aides only looked on the Fire Lord with hooded eyes, their hands clasped behind their backs, when the general retorted, "Then I might as well ask, _my Lord_, why you did not see fit to tell your allies about the escape of a known war criminal, and the greatest remaining threat to peace?"

And Zuko dropped his combative stance, when a cold dread began to seep inside him, quenching the flames of his righteous indignation. He might have known something like this would happen.

"I might ask," the general pushed on before Zuko could interrupt, "if I didn't already know you were on Ember Island at the time of the escape." His brown eyes shone black in the firelight, when he practically spat, "I might ask, if I did not suspect that you **colluded** in her flight. Or arranged for it _yourself_."

"That's a lie," Zuko said hoarsely. "I organized a search as soon as I learned —"

"Oh yes," How dismissed, "such a _visible _search effort. What a surprise that it yielded no results," he commented coldly, clenching a fist. "And where were _you_ during all this, Fire Lord Zuko?"

His sarcasm rankled, and Zuko mustered the offended dignity to warn, "Don't interrupt me in my own throne room, How." The older man glared at the polished floor, looking one-half contrite as he should have done. "I don't have to account for my time to you."

"Perhaps not," the general acknowledged after an appropriately timed pause, raising his head to regard the sovereign who stood above him. "But you are accountable to the Earth King, whom I represent. And to members of the international community. To establish your innocence is a simple matter," he prompted, his gaze fixed on Zuko with all the intensity of the erstwhile Dai Li who stood behind him. "Only provide your whereabouts."

The general and the Fire Lord stared each other down for a long moment, while Zuko shrank inside at the realization that he could never tell them where he was, or what he had been doing. And no plausible lies would come to him… _Azula_, he despaired. Gods damn it, where was her silver tongue when he needed it?

Zuko looked away first. And breathed deeply of the smoky air to collect himself.

"My guilt is not at issue here," Zuko finally replied, and settled his gaze on the unyielding general, who stood with gauntleted arms crossed over his chest. "I **demand** that you suspend her sentence, until she can be fairly tried."

The old man in ochre cleared his throat conspicuously, reminding Zuko for the first time in almost a minute that he was even here. His hands tucked inside the voluminous sleeves of his robe, he answered for How, "It is not in our power to alter or delay the execution of a sentence. If my Lord wishes to file an injunction —"

"Are you _serious?_" Zuko cut across him, directing the question at General How. "It takes **months** to get anything through the courts!" he asserted, with an angry thrust of his hand. "I could gain an audience with the _Earth King _sooner!"

His protest was met with the silence of three faces turned up at him in the firelight. A bland sort of expectancy they all shared in common, like they were waiting for him to get the punchline of a joke. And he realized —

The Earth Kingdom might blame Zuko for her escape, but this was exactly the opportunity they'd been waiting for. Using the more immediate threat of Azula and what she might do, they had excluded the Fire Nation to push through her conviction. It wouldn't stand — Zuko prayed to Agni it wouldn't — but they didn't need it to. Azula was outside his protection, and the Earth Kingdom knew it. They only needed to catch her first, they only needed to kill her, and no effort to clear her name could take that measure of revenge from them.

Zuko felt cold. He could get her conviction overturned. But it wouldn't put her head back on her shoulders.

"That trial was a _farce_," he said slowly at last, realization dawning faintly as a winter sun. Then he remembered. "And you have no **authority **to kill her!" His fingers clenched as if holding onto hope. "The tribunal agreed to a _maximum_ sentence of life in prison without parole." This was at Aang's insistence they spare every human life, before he would lend his support to the trials. Zuko had never been more grateful for his maddening pacifism than now.

The mustachioed old man drew a scroll from inside his sleeve, as if he had received some signal unknown to Zuko. How frowned at the accusation, fresh lines etched into his weathered face. "The princess was a special case —"

"Why, because she **won** your city?" Zuko demanded almost petulantly, recalling the argument at the peace summit. "Her coup of Ba Sing Se was **bloodless**, you _know_ it was!"

"The coup may have been bloodless," How countered harshly, "but the occupation was **not**." He referred, Zuko knew, to peasant rebellions in the Lower Ring that sprang up in the wake of their departure. And which Fire Nation soldiers had brutally suppressed.

"You can't hold her responsible for that!" Zuko insisted. He walked to the edge of the platform and extinguished the flames with a sweep of his hand, leaving only the light of torches and fresh fire in the trough at his back, which lay at the foot of the golden frieze. His shadow fell over General How and just touched the silent Dai Li. It was the kind of move his sister might have calculated. "Azula didn't **command** any troops outside the royal procession! She was _never_ commissioned as a general, or with any military rank."

"My Lord has made this argument before," the former Dai Li observed, breaking his silence at last. He still held his hands behind his back, with the air of one concealing a weapon. Zuko turned on him with a stinging reply on the edge of his tongue, but the Dai Li first concluded, "And we are inclined to agree with you."

And Zuko stopped, his harsh words forgotten and eyes flown wide at the unexpected concession. It was a trap, it had to be… The Dai Li turned a smile on him that would have looked right at home on Zhao's sanctimonious face. Zuko hated him more by the minute. "It would be far more accurate to prosecute her as a spy and saboteur," he smoothly concluded.

And his heart missed a beat. Zuko knew what the Earth Kingdom did to spies.

Maybe that was why he ignored the voice of caution, that said he would not convince these men, and they couldn't give him what he wanted anyway. Zuko knew, on a rational level, that they would keep hunting Azula regardless of anything he said here today. He was sure they'd already begun.

But neither could he remain silent in the face of this injustice, any more than Zuko could let the slaughter of the 41st Division pass without comment. And another, deeper part of him urged him to speak — the part that would sound like his mother, if he could still remember her voice…

_They threatened your family_, it said to him._ They don't just get to leave._

"She was a blood princess, sent to your country by her liege Lord," he reminded the general severely, who stood with fists propped on hips, the green cloth of his cape painted almost black in the firelight. Zuko gave the barest of pauses, uncertain even now whether to play this tile, for the consequences he knew must follow. "She had diplomatic immunity —"

How cut him off with a raised hand, "That would only apply if she acted in an _official_ capacity. By definition, she stopped acting in an official capacity when she assumed a false identity to infiltrate Ba Sing Se."

The irony might have made Zuko laugh, if he had been capable of anything but impotent rage at their continued denials. To see Azula's manipulations turned against her was his dearest desire once. But there had never been so much at stake.

"Indeed," the Dai Li put in, unchecked by an irritated glance back from How, "she entered the free states of the Earth Kingdom incognito, and did not publicly disclose her identity until the conquest of Ba Sing Se was complete. That makes all her acts beforehand eligible for prosecution."

"No one asked you!" the young Fire Lord snapped at him, though he managed to resist the urge to order the guards on either side of the curtained archway to remove the man from his presence. "And _what_ acts does he mean?" Zuko demanded of the general, turning on How with fire in his eyes. "I would hear the charges against her." He had to know what she was up against…

How flicked two fingers of his left hand at the mustachioed old man, who unfurled the scroll he still held and began in to read in a dry tone more at home in a lecture hall than at the seat of power.

"The princess was ruled an unlawful combatant. She may therefore be arrested and prosecuted under the domestic law of the Earth Kingdom, where her crimes were perpetrated. She stood accused and was convicted _in absentia_ of arson, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit genocide, cruelty to animals, destruction of property, espionage, hostage-taking, inhumane treatment, kidnapping, perfidy, sedition, theft, torture, unlawful deportation —"

"_What?!_" Zuko objected, finally collecting himself from the laundry list of charges against her. He jumped from the dais to the black tile floor to better refute them, and the wall of flames ignited in the trough behind him. "Azula never tortured anybody!" He knew. He'd checked, awkward as such inquiries had proved, in those first weeks when the fate of his insane sister hung in the balance.

General How leveled a flat stare at the Fire Lord, but it was the old man who answered, "She used threat of physical harm to the Kyoshi Warriors to extract information from their leader. That qualifies at least as coercion, if not psychological torture. Both of which violate the laws and customs of war."

But something still bothered Zuko, and it took a beat for him to realize what it was. "But you can't prove the conspiracy charge," he objected, tensing in suspicion. "The Scorched Earth Policy was an internal matter."

The other two exchanged a significant glance behind his back when How stiffened visibly, looking on the Fire Lord in plain disapproval. "We have the sworn deposition of a witness to the war meeting," he flatly contradicted.

And Zuko forgot to breathe for a second. A witness. It could only be one of the high admirals or generals he handed over to the war crimes tribunal. He reviewed the names in his head, in growing desperation…

Shin, he realized. And Zuko remembered bitterly how surprised he'd been to hear of the general's release, one of only three to occur in as many years. His rank was higher than either of the others, the charges against him more serious. Now Zuko knew how they'd been dropped.

"You'd free a man who _burned whole villages to the ground _for a vendetta against a teenage girl?" he demanded, advancing on the stoic How. "This is **not** justice!" Zuko pointed a finger at him in accusation.

And swift as a cliffside collapsing, the earthbender general knocked his hand aside, his tanned face gone livid at the insult. "You wouldn't know justice if it **bent** the earth from under you!" How roared, sweeping his fists down in the beginnings of an actual earthbending kata. "And you're _done_ protecting that grasping little bitch."

Zuko staggered a quick step back, not for the floor that shifted beneath his feet but for the sensation of having been punched in the gut. He just called — his sister —

So great was his surprise that Zuko didn't even notice the way his guards at the curtained archway tensed in readiness to defend him, taking up loose stances of their own until the general too stepped back, to stand with the other two men. Neither did Zuko notice that How was speaking again until a moment later —

"— remind you of your obligations. The Northern Water Tribe has already agreed to extradition, and we are in talks with the Southern Tribe. Let there be no question in your mind." The general looked hard at him to reinforce the point. "If you capture the princess first, you are **legally bound **to surrender her to the Earth Kingdom, for the execution of her sentence. Anything less would be a breach of international law, with consequences beyond your imagining."

General How waited a beat to ensure Zuko had no further objections, a mere formality at this point. Then he gripped his large fist in the opposite hand in the fashion of the Earth Kingdom and bowed from the waist, too swiftly for civility. The Dai Li and elder legate were still bowing in imitation when the general swept past them on his way to the curtained archway, and they had to scramble to catch up with the longer strides of the heavily-built earthbender.

His guards moved to block the curtained archway, knowing as well as Zuko did that royal audiences did not end until the Fire Lord concluded them. It wouldn't be enough, Zuko knew. And their departure jarred something loose in him. They would kill her. They would kill her. He couldn't let them leave.

He couldn't let it end like this.

"She's a _princess_ of the Fire Nation!" Zuko shouted defiantly, taking a step after them. "If you kill her, I'll consider it an act of **war!**"

How stopped. The other two stopped with him to glance over their shoulders at the Fire Lord. And for a split-second, the silence of the throne room was almost as oppressive as the darkness and the heat. The general turned on him, and the look on his face was so awful it fixed Zuko to the spot. "Then let the deaths of your countrymen be on _your_ head, Lord Zuko," he said dangerously.

The guards fell back, too shocked by what was practically a declaration of war to try to stop them. And the flame on the crimson curtains was rent in half when the general and his party departed the throne room. The imperial firebenders followed after a moment's hesitation.

The curtain closed behind them, its insignia made whole again. Flames crackled in the trough at his back, casting his shadow on the black tile floor. And minutes later, Zuko still stood as if turned to stone.

* * *

Moonlight shone palely through the window screens to fall on the restless form of Zuko, sprawled out on a crimson upholstered couch in the elegant antechamber of the room he shared with his wife. He entered their silent bedroom long after Mai retired for the night, just as he'd been doing since they returned from Ember Island. For the second night in a row, he considered waking her to tell her about the death sentence on Azula's head.

He had to tell someone. He didn't sleep at all the night before, had barely been sleeping before that. The servants were starting to whisper about his bad temper and haggard appearance. His friends still hadn't come. He had to tell someone.

Zuko turned over on the lonely couch to face the cushions at its back. He wished they smelled even a little like Mai. She was in the same room and might as well be half a world away. He sighed and let his eyes drift shut, hoping he was tired enough for sleep to claim him…

_He opened his eyes on the expanse of a great canopy above him, in a bed several sizes too large. Moonlight shone through window screens lined with rice paper and framed by crimson curtains on either side of him. The wood beams of his boyhood room arched overhead. A fine carpet cut a swath of red to the open door, where an achingly familiar figure pulled the hood of a traveling cloak over her head to turn from him to walk away._

_"Mom?" he questioned, sitting up in the overlarge bed. "Mom!"_

_The ten year old Zuko jumped out of bed and scrambled down the shallow steps after her. But by the time he cleared the door, Ursa was already disappearing around a corner down the peristyle, whose ghostly white curtains flapped like banners in the breeze. "Mom!" he called desperately after her, running as fast as his legs could carry him._

_The halls were empty as they always were when he dreamt this dream, and he just barely kept her in sight. She ran. The flash of her slippered feet hardly made a sound on the lush carpet and black stone of the vaulted halls. "Mom!" he yelled again._

_Zuko didn't recognize where they were anymore, he realized with an icy shard of fear. This was no part of the palace he'd ever seen before, even in his dreams, but he kept running blindly after her. Ursa rounded a corner, and Zuko followed, to find it opened on a dead end. There were no dead ends in the palace. _

_A heavy iron door lay at the end of the hallway. There was nowhere else she could have gone. His heart pounding wildly, Zuko ran to the door and wrenched it open._

_The torches that lined the hall behind him cast a warm rectangle of light over his sister's canopy bed. The eight year old Azula sat on top of the silk covers with legs crossed beneath her, her eyes fixed on Zuko from the moment he entered. Like she was waiting for him._

_Zuko stopped just inside, gone rigid with anger. It was supposed to be __**Mom**__ behind this door, not _Azula! _"Come on!" he urged her, taking a step into the room whose edges were lost in darkness, searching it for Ursa. "We have to find Mom, we can find where she is!"_

_"No one knows," Azula whispered, folding in on herself. She drew her knees to her chest, small hands held over her ears and eyes squeezed tightly shut, like if she closed herself completely enough, she could just disappear._

_"Knows _what?_" Zuko said impatiently, climbing the shallow steps to her bed. But there was an edge to his young voice that had less to do with impatience and more to do with fear. He was missing something important. "What are you talking about?"_

_Her teeth clenched, and tears streaked her heart-shaped face to drip from her chin. He hadn't seen Azula in such obvious pain since that time she broke her wrist when she first started training with Dad. "I'll never tell," she said almost fiercely. Her eyes still tightly closed, she rocked slowly forth and back with each repetition. "Never tell. Never tell. Never t-tell …"_

_It was like a mantra. Like when Zuko chanted "Azula always lies." And Zuko realized, with all the abruptness and absurdity of dream logic… She knew where Mom went! _That's_ what she would never tell!_

_"Where is she?" Zuko demanded hotly, jumping up beside her on the bed. "Tell me where she is!"_

_But Azula kept her eyes shut, the words "never tell" spilling like blue fire from her mouth. She probably couldn't even hear him with her hands over her ears! Zuko grabbed her arms to wrench them away —_

_"_Look_ at me!" he screamed like his heart was breaking, until he realized she was screaming too — a high-pitched, girlish shriek when her leather bracers melted in his grip. Her cry choked off abruptly, but Zuko still let go of her in shock._

_He burned her. He burned her…_

_Azula jerked away from him, her eyes wide and terrified. She tried to scramble off the wide expanse of bed, but her foot caught on the covers, and she fell off the edge to the stone steps below._

_"Azula!" he cried in alarm, his anger forgotten in an instant. _

_Zuko jumped down beside the small, still form at the bottom of the steps. But he recoiled when she writhed where she lay, her mouth open in a silent scream, her lip split and bleeding. She curled into a quivering ball of pain, arms crossed over her face as if to shield herself from a blow. Her blood pooled at his feet, blossomed like fire lilies in dark seeps across the brighter red of her pant legs, sleeves, tunic…_

_Like she was bleeding from a hundred wounds he couldn't see._

_"Stop it! _Stop it!_" Zuko cried, raking fingers through his hair in desperation. How could he help her when he didn't even know what was hurting her?_

_The torches in the hall outside blazed a harsh azure, and cast her shades of red to purples so deep they were almost black. As if a shadow fell instead of light. And Zuko turned —_

_Their mother stood in the door, the hood of her cloak thrown back and hands tucked inside the sleeves of her dress. It was her shadow that fell. Ursa looked down on her exsanguinating daughter, delicate brows drawn with something more like caution than concern. And she said, "What is wrong with that child?"_

_Zuko ran to her with his heart in his throat, seizing her arm in his urgency. "Mom, _please! _We have to help her!"_

_But Ursa just watched the girl shiver and bleed in the eerie blue light of her flames. And looking down on Azula, her whole aspect harshened, until the slant of her eyes grew still crueler, the line of her jaw more pointed. Until she wore Azula's face, as she appeared that night they — that night he found her._

_Her flame headpiece gleamed a sickly green in the dying light of the hall. And whatever she was now said slowly, "Her own _mother_, thought she was a __**monster**__." She turned her head to regard Zuko. And his plea died when horror rose to choke it like bile in his throat. "There's no helping someone like her," the amalgam spoke with all the gentle melancholy of Ursa._

_But she wasn't his mother. He didn't even know what she was._

_"No…" Zuko whispered brokenly. He couldn't believe that. He started almost compulsively toward the bleeding Azula, the one he still knew as his sister. But the other stopped him with a firm hand on his chest, and knelt beside Zuko. She grasped his shoulders in clawlike hands, as if to pull him away from the sight when Azula twitched once and went still, forever._

_But he couldn't tear his eyes away. Her left hand stroked his cheek. "Remember this, Zuko." Her voice was low and almost seductive, her breath hot in his ear._ _He shook a little when she leaned her head close to whisper, "No matter how she may seem to change, _never forget _what she is."_

She's dead. She's dead. I let her die_. Hot tears drew salted tracks down his cheeks._ What else is there for her to be?

_The torchlight from the hall drew down, casting their long, faint shadow over his sister's body and into the dark that swallowed the edges of her bedroom. Her thin fingers snaked through the hair at his nape. She pressed a soft kiss to the side of his neck._

_And he clenched his jaw, his teeth bared in a rictus of pain. Because Zuko felt more keenly than ever before that empty place inside. And if he looked too long into it, he knew he would forget what his mother admonished him. _

_He would forget who he was._

_The last light caught the eyes of Azula in a pool of her own blood, and they almost seemed to reproach him, even when the fire inside had gone out. _Don't look at me_, Zuko thought a little desperately. He would have said it, if she still had ears to hear._ Don't look, don't look —

_"Don't look," the other whispered harshly, and her hand flashed over his eyes, plunging him in black —_

_The insides of his eyelids greeted his sight, and his eyes snapped open. He had to blink frantically several times before his vision could adjust to the bright sunlight streaming through the open roof of the palace's Agni Kai arena. The thirteen year old Zuko stood alone at his end of the court, hands raised before him in readiness. But he dropped his stance when he saw who stood opposite him, her back turned._

_It was not his father, but —_

_"_Azula_," he gasped involuntarily._

_The five-point crown of the Fire Lord glinted in her half-topknot. The rest of her waist-length hair spilled down narrow shoulders, its subtle highlights catching the sun. She wore their mother's robe, her arms crossed in front of her and stance distinctly forbidding._

_She turned at the sound of his voice, her face framed by her trademark bangs, her painted lips grim and unsmiling. Her white arms were laid bare to the elbow, crossed over her chest with fingers drawn. She snapped them quickly to her sides as if she would rocket toward him, but discharged brief bursts of blue flame from her clenched fists instead, scorching the stone on either side of her with contemptuous ease. Her warning shot._

_But it wasn't her flames that made panic grip his stomach when Azula slowly approached, her bare feet padding softly on stone. It was the accusation that lay unspoken between them. Zuko could sooner stare into the sun than meet it. He couldn't even look at her._

_He searched the stands, separated from their stone court by a deep trough on all sides, but he couldn't find her child-self. Not where he'd seen her standing with Uncle when he entered the arena that day, nor anywhere else. The audience to his disgrace had changed too. _

_The tanned faces of Earth Kingdom officials in a dizzying array of greens and golds and shades of brown looked down on him, visibly outnumbering the rugged aspects of Water Tribe warriors clad in blue. His own people comprised a narrow majority of the audience, generals and admirals, nobles of the Fire court, his servants, his council and imperial firebenders, even the captain of his guard…_

_The three nations stood apart from each other, as neatly divided as at his coronation. But every face looked on him with varying degrees of disgust, hatred, contempt, horror, judgment … until the force of their stares weighed so heavily on Zuko that he could barely breathe._

_They knew. They _knew _—_

_"No one is coming," the voice that whispered in his heart spoke from behind Zuko. He jumped to hear his own fears voiced aloud, and turned to face Azula. The flames in the coal braziers at his back and at the opposite end of the court burned a scorching azure when she drew nearer, and Zuko felt perspiration bead his shoulders and the back of his neck._

_"No one will help you," she said almost gently, close enough that Zuko could just glimpse something sad and secret behind her eyes. "Your friends will betray you. Just like mine."_

_"Stop it, you're _lying!_" he rejected, his fists clenched like he had any way to make her stop saying these things. But wasn't she right? Of all the faces in the arena, weren't his friends still missing? "They would never do that to me."_

_"Wouldn't they?" Azula looked on him impatiently, as if he were too blind to see something right before of his eyes. She stopped a few paces away, indicating the spectators with a wave her hand. "How much do you think they'll _love_ you," her words clipped with resentment, her fingers clenched, "when they learn what you _did?_"_

_"No!" Zuko shouted, his voice breaking. And even now, it was more plea than empty denial. "Azula always lies…"_

_"She's not the only one," chimed in a flat voice from the distant stands, sounding so close she might have been at his shoulder. _Mai._ Zuko spotted her near the front of the Fire Nation crowd with their son propped on her narrow hip, and his heart soared in the second it took for her implicit accusation to register._

_Oh. Oh…_

_She wore no crown, and Lu Ten played with her loose hair, oblivious to proceedings. But Mai looked on Zuko with the blank eyes of a stranger, her white face as cold and unyielding as a marble statue when she said, "You lied to me."_

_"I never lied!" Zuko insisted. "It was a _mistake! _Just one mistake…" he pleaded desperately, when Mai turned her back on him, holding their son tightly to shield him from view. "She made me so angry, I just lost control —"_

_"Don't you dare," a gruff voice cut across him, and Zuko felt his blood turn to ice in his veins. Iroh shouldered his way to the front of the Earth Kingdom crowd, clad in the verdant green of his tea maker's robes and followed shortly by a scowling Toph, who took in the scene with eyes even blanker than Mai's and a silence uncharacteristic to her._

_"Don't you _dare_ blame this on her!" his uncle roared, pointing an accusatory finger at Zuko. His rebuke stung like a lash of fire. "She's crazy, Zuko. She's _crazy!_" he indicated Azula with an angry thrust of his hand, but she only watched him impassively, her arms crossed and a frown creasing her face. "What's _your _excuse?" Iroh demanded._

_Zuko flinched at his attack, he could not have been more surprised if Uncle had literally cut his heart out. His uncle had always supported him, always. How could he take Azula's side? And he recalled her warning… _

_Was what he did so awful that even Iroh couldn't love him anymore?_

_His tear-filled eyes found Sokka and Katara standing arm in arm at the head of the Water Tribes. They turned near-identical expressions of disgust on him, and he knew he would find no understanding there. Sokka had a little sister. Katara _was_ a little sister. She had even asked about Azula, and she, in particular, looked like she wanted to water whip him._

_And Zuko felt a pang at their unity of opinion. Sure, they bickered all the time, but they were obviously close. Why couldn't he have that with Azula? he wondered, and not for the first time. Why couldn't she just be normal?_

_Zuko finally sighted the teenaged Avatar standing alone in an empty section of stands, looking sadly down on him with his glider staff in hand. "Aang, please …" he almost begged._

_He left unsaid that the airbender was the first to offer him the hand of friendship. That Aang had the kindest heart of any of them, and if he couldn't forgive, no one would…_

_"How could you do this?" Aang asked him, visibly hurt. And Zuko grasped in that moment how wrong it was, that Aang should ever know this darkness could dwell in anyone's heart. "We trusted you. We gave you a second chance."_

_"I'm _sorry_," Zuko wept at last and dropped to his knees, his hands pressed against the warm stone. "I'm sorry!"_

_"No you're not," Azula contradicted harshly, and his head jerked up to meet her gaze when his sister stepped in front him. Her makeup ran with the tears that streamed down her face to match his own, and Zuko knew a moment of blinding rage._

_What did she have to cry about? She hadn't just been rejected by everyone she knew and loved — He stopped, when the words she never spoke echoed from the depths of his memory. _Just like mine…

_"You don't know what _sorry_ is," Azula whispered hatefully, as if she'd read his mind. "You won't know until I'm through with you." _

_His eyes widened at the threat, but a quick glance at the crowd on either side of him told Zuko no one would intervene. They thought he deserved this, and maybe he did. She lit a blue flame in her right palm, and something in him seized up at the old familiar fear. He couldn't stand, he couldn't fight, he could barely breathe —_

A hand wreathed in flame, reaching for him.

_"You _will_ learn regret," Azula promised him, her voice thick with something that sounded unbelievably like grief. Her tears shone in the light of her fire. "And _suffering_ will be your teacher." She reached out to him —_

A pain so blinding that in that moment, the world was simply gone —

_And Zuko screamed with remembered pain, so crippling it was a long moment before he realized someone else was screaming too. _

_It was Azula._

_Tears streamed from his right eye and he couldn't even see out of his left, but Zuko needed only the dimmest perception to guess what had happened. In marking him, she immolated herself. He could only watch in growing panic as blue fire peeled the skin from her bones and every inch of her burned…_

_Worse still than the screaming was when it stopped. The flames still licked hungrily at the black and blistered, misshapen mass that folded opposite him, and just like anything that burned, there was no telling now what she had been before. _

_Only his memory remained to indicate that this had been his sister, and he could not bid it be silent, he could not even wish to forget. Because just like anything that burned, Zuko knew he couldn't hold her. She would scatter to the winds, and there would be nothing, nothing left of her, of what they had —_

_She collapsed, and he tried vainly to catch her. She crumbled to ash in his hands._

_His whole head throbbed and stung with his burn, and it could not begin to compare to the pain that blossomed in his chest, the keening cry torn from the deepest part of his throat — the part of him beyond words, beyond expression, beyond reason._

_There was no one left to hear it. The arena and the stands and everyone in them had vanished in a sourceless light. There was only the cruel stone of their deadly court, and the black smear where a part of him died, and the harsh wind that bore her ashes away, and he was alone, he was alone _he was alone —

Zuko woke with a sharp gasp and a racing heart, sitting quickly upright on the sofa. He reached up with a shaking hand to wipe the tears from his face and looked all around the silent room, oddly comforted by its darkness, in place of that empty light. It wasn't enough. Zuko still felt unclean, like he had her blood on his hands, or — or her ashes…

Oh gods, this had to stop. That wasn't even the worst nightmare he'd had since —

This had to stop. He had to stop it.

Zuko believed his friends were still coming. He _had_ to believe his friends were still coming. But he could not be idle in the meantime. He had to do something now, or he would go mad with waiting.

_He helped you with her once before_, Zuko ran through the same argument he had put to himself (and rejected) what seemed like a hundred times in the past week. _He could help you again._

Zuko had a lot of compelling reasons to stay away. But none so compelling as the need for action, the consequences if he waited too long. If anyone knew where to find her, it would be Ozai.

It was time to pay a visit to his father.

He padded silently over to the wardrobe and pulled his black boots back on, throwing a crimson cloak trimmed in gold over his shoulders. He tugged the sleeves straight and the hood over his head, and walked out the door. He didn't see Mai sit up in bed behind him, her narrow eyes gleaming out of the dark.

* * *

Three years and more had passed since Zuko saw his father, he recalled, following a leather-clad guard down the torchlit halls of the capital prison and past several of her fellows spaced at regular intervals along the rough stone walls. Zuko wondered if he'd changed at all. Somehow he doubted it.

In a way, Zuko was counting on him not to. His unrelenting selfishness may be disgusting, but it was at least predictable. Now all Zuko had to do was convince Ozai it was in his best interest to help capture his favorite child.

Right, no problem. Zuko sighed, throwing the hood of his cloak back when the guard knocked twice sharply on the iron door to his father's cell, and turned the key. She gave the door a push inward and stepped back from the threshold with a perfunctory bow and her hands held fist to palm. Her long ponytail fell over one shoulder.

"Tell the guards to keep their distance," Zuko ordered her in parting. "I want this conversation to stay private."

"Yes, Fire Lord," she acknowledged, inclining her head respectfully before she set off down the hall. He pushed the door open and stepped into the cell.

The torchlight from the hall behind him cast Zuko's shadow over what looked like a bundle of rags, thrown carelessly on top of the pallet at the back of the cell. His father stirred when the light from without fell over him. He sat up on the pallet, hunched inward with the thin blanket thrown over his still-broad shoulders and clutched tightly in a bony hand. This took him longer it should.

Zuko frowned, and lit a torch on the wall to his right with a dart of flame, easing the door closed behind him. "Father," he said in greeting.

"Traitor," Ozai rasped in reply. His black hair and flowing beard combined in an unruly tangle to hide most of his face, but his gold eyes were still canny in their sunken sockets when he studied his son.

"Come in all your _state_ to see me?" he noted sarcastically, taking in Zuko's loose hair and lack of crown when he approached, the simple cloak he wore. "Even if you won't sit the throne much longer, you could at least dress the part."

Zuko stopped just short of the bars, eyes flashing at the well-aimed barb. "What are you **talking** about?" he snapped, an edge to his voice.

"What _you_ came here to talk about," Ozai easily replied. His beard twitched with the hint of a triumphant smile. "Azula's escape."

Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. "How did you guess?" he bit out.

"You increased the guard around my cell," his father said, brows drawn sharply in disdain. "And the Avatar took my bending, not my _wits_."

Zuko scowled at the cutting assessment, and drew a deep breath. "I'm sending Aang and my friends after her. I've alerted our provincial governors and intelligence to keep eyes out. It's only a matter of time until she's found, but…" he paused, considering how to put this. "But by then, it may be too late."

Ozai looked up at him skeptically, the obvious question written in his eyes. _Too late for whom? For her, or for _you?

"The Earth Kingdom sentenced her to death," Zuko admitted, dropping his gaze. He heard his father sit up straighter, letting the blanket fall from his shoulders. The weight of his disapproval hung in the silence of the night air like a suffocating damp.

"And do you really expect me to believe," Ozai coldly opined, "they acted without your consent?"

The accusation stung, and Zuko jerked his head up to meet it. "They went behind my **back!**" he defended, spreading his hands in angry disavowal.

Ozai searched his face, and in an instant, saw the truth of his words. It didn't make him look any happier. "The Earth Kingdom have been our enemies for a hundred years," he reproved, shivering with rage. "Because you give them everything they ask, does that makes them your **friends?** Have you learned _nothing_ from your failure with me?" Ozai gesturing to himself in illustration.

His fingers clenched so hard his nails bit into the palms of his hands. "I didn't come here to open old wounds," Zuko grit out before Ozai could provoke him further. "Tell me where to find her. Please, Father," the plea stuck in his throat, but Zuko forced himself to say it. "Help me help her."

Ozai actually snorted in contempt. "I told you once before. She doesn't need my help."

Zuko took a quick step closer, a stinging retort on the edge of his tongue, when his father concluded, "_You_ do, for a certainty. But you're going about this the wrong way." _As usual_, his tired glare seemed to add. Zuko exhaled a sharp breath, but let him talk.

"You think to chase her to the ends of the earth, like you did the Avatar —" His words choked off in a fit of coughing that bent Ozai double and startled Zuko in its violence. He took a step closer to the bars without conscious decision. Ozai caught his breath before Zuko could voice his concern though, and waved him away with a brusque hand.

"But Azula is a lot smarter," his father wheezed and blinked away tears, straightening painfully, "and knows you well enough to stay one step ahead of you." He paused, and seemed to reconsider this. "Or more likely, _several_. If you ever catch up to her, it will be on her terms, and for no reason **you** would like."

"But —"

"_You will never find her_," Ozai interrupted, still clutching his middle. "If you ever hope to see Azula again, she will have to come to you. And she will only come to you, if you have something she wants."

And Zuko saw his angle. "You mean, something like _you_."

Ozai inclined his head, though not quickly enough to hide the infuriating smirk that tugged at the corners of his mouth.

His mismatched eyes narrowed in suspicion. "What makes you think she wants anything to **do** with you?" Zuko demanded, more bitterly than he could readily explain. "She hasn't tried to free you yet."

Ozai regarded his son as if Zuko had made a particularly dim joke. "Of course not," he smoothly replied, undercut when he cleared his throat and failed to dislodge something that sounded like it shouldn't be there. "This is the first place you'd expect her. And she would never be so predictable.

"But…" He flashed a wolfish grin, baring yellowed teeth. "If you were to put me before a board of appeals, or transfer me to another prison —"

"I will _never_ bargain for your release," Zuko spat, clutching a swift hand to himself as if to withdraw the possibility. "Or admit any chance of your escape. I would find another way, before it came to that."

"You wouldn't be _here_ if there were any other way," his father rejoined, insufferably smug for someone sitting behind bars. "And I think we both know it."

"_Damn_ you and your mind games!" Zuko burst out, reminded of exactly why he avoided visiting his father for this long. "I don't have **time** for this! _Azula_ doesn't have time!" he cried, throwing his arm wide as if to indicate his fugitive sister.

Ozai rolled his eyes. "You have time enough to waste _mine_," he sneered, draping his arms casually across his knees. "You come here asking for advice, when what you really want is a quick fix."

Zuko blinked, and his father deigned to clarify, "You want me to give you a name, a location, somewhere to start looking." Ozai shook his head slowly, as if to clear it. "I may have been _close_ to Azula, but we are not one mi_nd_ —"

His voice caught on the vowel and a spate of coughing took him again, shorter than the first, but more wracking. Ozai snatched up the discarded blanket from behind him and half-coughed, half-spat what looked alarmingly like blood into it, with an indifference that was telling all by itself. He balled up the ruined blanket, looking quite as disgusted as Zuko felt to watch him, and threw it into a corner of the cell.

"What's wrong with you?" Zuko demanded at last, scowling. Could he really be as sick as he seemed, or was he pretending in some misguided bid for sympathy?

His father glared back through bloodshot eyes, his bearded lip twisting in an ugly grimace. "Nothing that hasn't been wrong for weeks." Noting Zuko's surprise, he added, "You must have lost the notice under a pile of paperwork. Though I suppose you have bigger problems."

"Azula," Zuko confirmed quietly, allowing his misdirection. He could look into Ozai's condition later.

His father nodded. "The best I could give you would be conjecture," he resumed right where he left off. "And it would not be very educated. I haven't seen her for four years, and can only guess at her motives."

And Zuko recalled their fight. "She said she was going to find Mom," he blurted almost eagerly, before he remembered who he was talking to.

"_What?_" Ozai demanded sharply, staring at his son in something approaching alarm.

"I mean, she was probably lying…" Zuko backpedaled, but Ozai cut him off.

"She said to _you? _When?" he pressed, shuddering visibly. "You don't see her."

Zuko blinked at his tone, more a command than a statement of fact. He swallowed once hard, realizing too late that he was treading on dangerous ground. "We had a fight," Zuko admitted carefully. He took a step back from the bars, unnerved by his father's unblinking glare. "At our old house on Ember Island, I — confronted her before she could leave."

"Alone?" Ozai said quickly, and Zuko nodded. "And you let her get away?"

"Of course not! I was — she — she knocked me unconscious," Zuko invented.

"You're _lying_," Ozai snarled, scrutinizing him. He clambered to his feet and swayed perilously, before he could right himself by gripping the wall behind him. "You come here asking for my **help**," he spat, eyes blazing in the torchlight, "and lie to me. To _me!_" His father walked right up to the bars as if he would lay hands on him, were it not for the obstacle.

"What happened?"

Zuko watched him uneasily, his own heartbeat thudding in his ears. He didn't have to tell him anything, but — but didn't Uncle always say the burden of a secret grew less when you shared it? But to share this with _him_, it hadn't even **helped** with Mai. It just made things worse. But he knew Azula better than anyone, he was the only one who knew how to help her before. Maybe — maybe he could tell Zuko why she did this? And besides, who would believe Ozai, who would _ever_ believe him if he tried to tell —

Zuko ran a callused hand down his face, as if to quell the debate that raged inside him. He swallowed again, steeling himself. "We were fighting," he said hoarsely at last, directing his words at the floor. His voice shook anyway. "And something changed."

He chanced a glance up, and was not reassured in the least by his father's close attention. "I got close enough — to land a blow," he forced himself to continue. "I hit — I mean, I hurt — I burned her," he corrected, sorting the sequence of events in his mind. "And — she kissed me."

An odd stillness crept over Ozai's face, but he said nothing. Zuko really wished that he would blink already.

"We d— we had sex," he spoke painfully into the silence, and there was nothing left to say.

A scowl cut his father's brow. Zuko could practically feel his wrath gather like the charge before a lightning bolt. "You raped her," Ozai corrected flatly.

"NO!" Zuko paled and fell a quick step back, as if that word were a physical blow. "I never would have done it if she hadn't kissed me first —"

"_Idiot_ boy!" His rebuke fell like a clap of thunder. "You think I trained her to **bed** so she could whore herself to _you?!_"

Zuko froze. His eyes fixed on his father in shock, as the implication unfolded to him. "What?" he whispered. And Ozai's face fell when he realized his mistake.

"You WHAT?!" Zuko exploded, seizing the bars with such violence that his father actually retreated to the back of his cell. "You sick _fuck_, what did you **do?!**"

"I trained her," Ozai repeated slowly, holding his white hands out at his sides as if to back away from a rabid animal. "To extract information, exact promises … and kill especially sensitive targets." His bearded lip curled with scorn, despite his caution. "So imagine my _surprise_, to see you still among the **living**."

And Zuko remembered daggers of flame in her hands, when he overpowered her. She meant to do — she was trying to kill him.

"Most men would see her sex as a weakness," his father explained, with a zeal that was truly disturbing. "They would be wrong. I trained her to use it as a weapon."

He sounded proud — _proud_ — of what he did. And Zuko felt almost lightheaded, as if there were not enough air in the room to support the fire of his rage. What did he do to her? What did he **do?**

"How did you train her?" He fixed Zuko with a hateful look, but said nothing. "_How?!_"

"You dare pretend you have any right," Ozai spoke slowly, deliberately, "to make demands of _me? _When you did the same —"

"_She wasn't my _**daughter!**" Zuko screamed, voice breaking when his last hope of denial shattered. He gripped the bars so hard his arms ached, but he barely felt it. Because he knew now _he knew_ just what their father did to her. _When you did the same_…

"And what was she to _you? _A prize to prove your **worth?**" Ozai spat, inclining his unruly head. "Spoils of war? When did you ever once look at her as your sister?"

"Shut up! SHUT UP!" Zuko howled, striking the bars. "Don't you **dare** talk to me about _family!_" His voice cracked when he clutched his arm. "I've done more for her than she _ever_ deserved!"

"But you didn't do it for her," his father ruthlessly maintained, approaching the bars to press his advantage. "You did it for _yourself_. To salve your **guilt**, or for any of a _hundred_ other reasons weak and moralistic fools like you would never admit. There is no such thing as true selflessness in this world," he put forth fiercely, as if imparting an important lesson. "I need no more proof of that than you."

"That's not —" he tried, but couldn't even say it. He could barely breathe, and retreated from the bars when Ozai gripped them lightly, looking out at him like he was looking _in_ on the hidden prisoner Zuko's own crime had made of him. "I never — wanted —"

His shadowed eyes lit with a predatory gleam. "How did you accomplish it, you little **shit?**" Ozai darkly demanded, switching tacks with the abruptness of an expert interrogator. "Was she _drugged_, was that it? Did she go crazy again? In what _world_ could you best her? You've never been that lucky."

But his words broke over Zuko distantly, like the fall of waves outside the window on that fateful night. Far more immediate were the stinging of his eyes and the tightness in his chest and the dull roar in his ears and the _need_, now he could not deny it, to know why this had happened…

"Your _daughter_ —" Zuko wept, voice straining and fingers clenched futilely. "She was — How could you do it?" he asked plaintively, his eyes fixed on the stony aspect of the man he called Father. His mind could not supply the words he needed, there were no words for this. "How could you — do —"

Ozai looked on his tears in manifest impatience. "Well, who else was going to teach her?" he rejoined. "Her _mother?_"

Zuko's eyes flew wide. That he would sully her name with his crimes — Something broke inside him, like the string of a pipa snapping when it was wound too tightly. Cloth caught fire in his hands when he reached through the bars to make Ozai feel even a fraction of the pain he inflicted. Someone was screaming, and he couldn't tell if it was his father or himself…

His mind went so black with rage that Zuko didn't remember much of what happened next.

He didn't begin to come back to himself until the guards, muttering nervously, hauled him out into the chill predawn air of the white stone steps outside the prison. Zuko barely heard them. Their hands on him were as insubstantial as the tug of a breeze at his cloak. He walked as if in a dream. Or a nightmare.

Tears streaked his face, and his breath still caught on the edge of sobbing. _I'll never tell, never tell, never tell_, his sister's mantra echoed from a time that hadn't been. She couldn't tell him what their father did. So she showed him instead…

And Zuko realized. This look he'd caught on her face during — The distance in her eyes. Like she wasn't even there. Like it wasn't even him that she was seeing. Oh Agni. When she changed, those things she said to him… The things their _father _— said to her —

His stomach turned. Zuko broke from the startled guards and, falling to his knees, threw up on the stone steps, shivering as if with fever. He dimly registered their exclamations of concern as they helped to him to his feet. Did he need a doctor? Should they send word to Lady Mai? What were his orders?

He waved them away. His hands were still shaking.

"Take me home," he whispered brokenly, in the unnatural quiet that fell when he responded at last to their anxious demands. "Take me — back to the palace."

The prison guards exchanged bewildered looks, but parted from Zuko to reveal his palanquin sitting at the foot of the stone steps. Four palace servants in their crimson smocks stood around it, one at each corner.

Where had that come from? Zuko wondered distantly. He walked here…

The woman guard who admitted him to Ozai's cell offered Zuko her arm, and he accepted her help down the steps, too unsteady on his feet to think of refusing. Zuko climbed into the palanquin. The curtain closed behind him.

And he was alone.


	10. Rescue

**To no one's surprise, I must again apologize for the wait. I meant to get this chapter out at least a week earlier, but the demands of my job interfered. Thank you in the meantime to Meneldur, whose input has proven invaluable as always, and to another reader whose questions (and our subsequent exchange of PMs) helped me clarify my ideas on the situation between Zuko and the Earth Kingdom.**

**Thanks as well to my reviewers, as I really enjoyed seeing your response to last chapter's revelation. Some clarification re: your analysis for Attila1987: Notice that Ozai says he trained Azula not just to kill, but to "exact promises" and "extract information." The skill she gained from her training could be put to many potential uses.**

**Your speculation on the basic nature of this training was intriguing, but would be a little self-defeating, as you pointed out the impossible nature of the task. Also, Azula had already learned how to kill from her training in firebending and hand-to-hand combat. Instead, Ozai's objective was twofold. To train Azula to keep her head about her in the act, so that she could do what needed to be done, and to make her skilled enough that she could effectively distract her partner and/or make him compliant to her will.**

**And yes, the Earth Kingdom did learn of Azula's escape (and Zuko's disappearance that night) suspiciously quickly. As it probably won't come up in-story for a while, I don't mind telling you now: You were right. It was my idea they had a Dai Li agent secreted among the asylum staff to monitor Azula. Good catch.**

**Warning: The following chapter exceeds 13K words, part of the reason it took so long to write. Hopefully it's worth it though, as we get plenty of Azula, as requested. And Zuko gets his hug.**

**Happy reading, and (as always) please leave a review!**

* * *

Azula stood at the bow. Her simple linen harem pants, tied at the waist and cut to mid-calf, stirred in the breeze. Eyes narrowed against the glare of morning light off the water, she squinted to discern the approaching line of land on the eastern horizon. The ship had made only one stop previously, at Fire Fountain City to resupply. It was there that Azula, supposed cousin to the cook, had "boarded" to join the crew in sailing for the colonies.

It was a credit to the ignorance of these unwashed peasants that they could think she was any relation to Rai. The two women shared little more than the same skintone and a cabin in common. Azula's skepticism toward that plan must have shown when Rai voiced it, for the cook reassured her, a little nervously, that she had seen cousins look less alike. Azula thought of square-jawed Lu Ten with his sleepy eyes, and privately agreed.

She supposed the crew might just be pretending to buy her story, to avoid the inconvenience of imprisoning her — until they handed Azula over for whatever bounty her brother had placed on her head. Except that they were heading in the wrong direction. And Azula didn't give pirates that much credit for patience, even if they might possess a certain low cunning. No, Fire Fountain City would have been the opportunity to act, if anyone had recognized her. So far, the only person she thought might recognize her was the cook.

Rai treated her with a grating familiarity and borderline deference by turns, such that even five days later, Azula could form no definite impression of her. She still remembered the first night she shared the cook's tiny cabin. Rai had dragged a metal washbasin into the middle of the wood plank floor, and made a bath for the fugitive princess, by then somewhat ripe from days passed in the hold. The bath was practically scalding, just like Azula liked it. The cook went ashore for a time then, she said, to buy food and some new clothes for her to wear, while they cleaned the ones she stowed away in.

The hot water soothed the ache in her sprained ankle so effectively that Azula thought she might have fallen asleep in the bath, for the next time she looked to the candle set atop the crude dresser, it had burned noticeably lower than she remembered. She stepped out of the washbasin, dripping water all over the wood floor but surer of foot than she had been when the cook first found her.

Azula grabbed the towel draped over a chair for her, and had nearly patted herself dry when she caught sight of her reflection in the weathered mirror standing in the corner, and stopped. She had deliberately avoided looking in any mirrors when she left the house on Ember Island. Not that Azula needed to look in a mirror to hallucinate her mother, but the act seemed to invite it for whatever reason, and she wasn't taking any chances.

She moved to stand in front of this one now, dropping the towel away from the water and studying her reflection. Her split lip had knit almost completely in the intervening days, to a tender pink that Azula knew from experience would not scar. In another week or so, her burn would fade too, leaving no trace of her singular failure.

What actually surprised her were the bruises, big ones painted gray, yellow, and green across her right shoulder and back and left hip and both knees and an elbow. Azula frowned at her reflection. She never used to bruise so easily. When she moved closer to the mirror, she could even see the subtle mark of fingers around her neck and where he held her hips against him…

Leave it to her clumsy brother to injure someone during sex, Azula reflected wearily. Sometimes she wondered how Mai put up with him. But he was probably a lot nicer to Mai, since he cared for her at all. Azula thought that probably made a difference, when people had sex.

Her head hurt, she realized. All of her hurt, as if she needed to see the full extent of her injuries in order to feel them. She wanted to climb back in the bath water and fall asleep again, for longer this time.

It was weakness, and Azula dismissed it out of hand. She had slept long enough in the asylum. That was exactly what she'd go back to if she were captured. She could not afford to make these kinds of mistakes, even in her own thoughts, she told herself. She told herself. Possibly out loud.

The tint on her lips, the kohl lining her eyes were gone from days of wear, and she hadn't brought any cosmetics with her. Azula wondered now why she took the time to apply them in the first place. If she hadn't, he might never have found her…

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Her jaw clenched. When had she become so _weak? _Azula studied her reflection with critical eyes. What would Father say, if he knew what she was thinking, what she allowed herself to think? He would despise her. He would have every right to. Her fingers curled into fists, closed around something that wasn't there.

The door opened behind her, and Azula tensed. But it was not the figment of her father that she banished. Or her mother, that she knew she hadn't. The hallucinations never used doors anyway, neither came nor went. They simply were. No, it was the cook.

Rai stopped just inside the door, a bundle of cloth in her hands and her round face gone slack with surprise. Clearly, she expected Azula to be finished by now and not standing naked in front of a mirror. It was still no excuse for not knocking. Azula crossed arms over her breasts and scowled into the mirror, rather than turn around and acknowledge the intrusion as anything more than a minor annoyance, soon to be removed.

Rai didn't leave or apologize, or even avert her gaze, but looked on Azula with something more akin to anger than embarrassment. Azula was about to demand what the hell she was looking at, when the stout cook spoke first. "With men like that, it never stops," she volunteered, gray eyes taking in the fading bruises and burn, her slow-mending ankle. "No matter what they promise."

Azula made no reply, only glared daggers at Rai's reflection in the mirror. The cook remembered herself, and paling visibly, dropped her gaze like a chastised servant. She laid the new clothes on the bed by the door, and ducked back out without a word, closing it behind her.

The princess fought a sigh now, her hands gripping the wood guardrail as she traced the line of the bowsprit and jib that cut her view of the coast in half. That was not the first indication Rai had given that she escaped an abusive relationship, and believed Azula had just done the same. She was content enough to let the cook keep thinking that, if it meant three square meals a day and safe passage.

Azula just hoped she didn't insist on trying to give advice or share her own experience. She had not asked for or invited such a confidence, but that didn't tend to stop someone with an agenda. And the cook had an agenda, that much Azula knew.

Just what that was proved harder to pin down, when her behavior toward Azula was so contradictory. As irritating as it proved to be on the receiving end of her pity, or transparent attempts at friendship, it was the respect Rai afforded her, on occasions like her trespass on Azula's bath, that made the princess truly wary.

If she were the same breed of royalty as Zuko, she might think this a natural consequence of her noble bearing, and no more than she was due. But Azula was second-born, and she knew that it was not enough to be owed obedience, or loyalty, or love. You had to exact it. You had to earn it. It would not simply be given.

That was the mistake that would undo her brother, and Azula intended to avoid it.

Her hard-won reputation did not precede her here. So far as the cook knew, she was simply Lin, only child of an admiral in the Fire Navy. She had fled their family home after her father was arrested for war crimes, and their servants had stripped the place, leaving her with only the clothes on her back.

Nothing about that circumstance was deserving of respect, even if it was increasingly common, to hear the crew talk. Her brother would gut their high command entirely, in his zeal to appease the poor victimized dirt peasants. She wondered how Zuko expected to defend himself when he finally beggared the realm, and they showed up on his doorstep demanding more reparations. But why should he think of defending himself now? He'd always had someone else to do that for him…

_He_ was not deserving of respect, Azula considered bitterly. And neither was Lin, which just made the cook granting it — if only intermittently — that much more suspicious. She knew … something. And Azula intended to find out what it was.

"Hey, lady!" a bright, obnoxious voice on the edge of puberty intruded on her thoughts, and her brows tweezed with annoyance. Azula turned to regard the skinny kitchen boy, Rai's shaggy haired assistant, followed at a distance by the woman in question. She had not heard their approach over the rush of waves parting at the stem.

"Um…" he faltered, blushing violently in the sunlight when her gaze fell on him.

"_Lin_," the cook supplied from the head of the steps behind him, in the equivalent of a stage whisper.

"Lin," the kitchen boy echoed, grinning, and Azula saw that he still had all his teeth. Quite an accomplishment among this lot. "We're gonna reach Dao Sou soon."

Azula crossed her bare arms, raising an eyebrow. "You have a talent for stating the obvious." _My brother could use council like yours_, she added silently, and could not suppress a smirk.

He seemed to take this for a genuine smile, and heartened visibly. "There's a lot of shops and things, and some nice restaurants, if you don't mind Earth Kingdom food."

The sun-browned kitchen boy rubbed the back of his neck, as if bracing himself for a perilous undertaking. "I know all the best places, I could — show you around," he offered, eyes on the deck. He chanced a glance at Azula when she didn't reply, and added quickly, "If — if you wanted."

Azula blinked once. "No."

"Oh, okay," he choked out, cringing at her rejection. "Maybe some other time." Azula stared. "Okay," he repeated, and moved quickly to descend the stairs back to the middle deck.

Rai watched him go, then looked at her in obvious reproach. It was the kind of look she used to get from her mother, and Azula hated it at once. "He wanted to spend some time with you, that's all," she said quietly over the wind that tugged a few stray hairs from Azula's braid. "He likes you."

Azula didn't bother telling the cook what she told her the first time, that he was a twelve year old boy on a pirate ship, and would like anything with prominent breasts that wasn't three times his age. The look Rai gave her then was even worse than the one she fixed on the princess now.

And people wondered why she lied, when she got looks like that for telling the truth, Azula considered. She learned a long time ago which option served her better. And anyway, she shouldn't care what a peasant thought of her.

"You might have let him down easier," Rai continued, stepping closer with white hands spread at her sides. "He's a sweet boy, even if he trips over his tongue as often as his own two feet."

A scowl cut Azula's brow, when something in the cook's tone reminded her of Ursa's angry remonstrations, all the little pointless niceties she tried to drill into her daughter. What made this woman think she could succeed where her mother failed?

"I knew his like once," Azula contradicted darkly, thinking of her brother before he got his scar. "You shouldn't let the helpless exterior fool you."

"Really?" the cook asked in genuine surprise. "I hadn't thought —"

"No, evidently _not_," Azula bit out, heading off the inevitable question.

Rai gave a quiet sigh and let her hands drop, yielding to Azula's harsh glare. "Would you like to come with me then? Into town?" she offered half-heartedly.

"No," Azula flatly replied. "I will stay aboard. There's nothing for me there."

The cook lowered her eyes, so Azula couldn't make out her expression. "As you wish, m—" Rai stopped, glancing up almost fearfully to meet her sharp gaze. "Lin," she corrected, and left abruptly by the same stairs the kitchen boy took.

Azula frowned after her, then turned to watch the shoreline bob gently in out of view behind the guardrail. She counted silently to six hundred, before descending to the gun deck.

There was nothing to watch outside the ports but the waves for a while. Then the white stone seawall of the harbor crept into view, with rocks tumbled at its foot, and behind this, a tapered square tower a few stories tall, with a guardhouse perched on top. It was perhaps a customs office, or a garrison, Azula thought. The green tile roof clearly indicated their port as Earth Kingdom though.

The ship slowed to a stop, and Azula crossed to the opposite port to look down on the skinny wooden pier where they docked. The captain and three of his more heavily-muscled hands found her still standing at the port, when they came below decks to open the hold.

"Come to help us unload, girlie?" the captain asked her, fingering his thin black mustache skeptically. Azula thought he dressed more like the ring master of a circus than a ship's captain, in so many bright and clashing colors that she could practically hear Mai complaining it would make her throw up.

Azula turned a cool smirk on him, her burned arm resting casually on the sill of the gun port. "That depends. Will I see any of the money you make?"

The flamboyant man chuckled at her audacity, just as she guessed he would, and the two pot-bellied hands, brothers and the shorter of the three, joined in with a rumble of laughter. Only the hirsute third hand scowled at her, put off by her humor. But he hadn't liked much that Azula did since she refused his _company_ — for lack of a better term — her first night among the crew.

"Ye'd make more money on your _back_, whore," he practically spat, cutting the laughter short. Then he actually spat on the wood planks, as if to punctuate his contempt.

Azula resisted the urge to put him on **his** back, in a more painful circumstance than he would have chosen. The captain looked about to reprimand him, but she spoke first. "With that charming disposition, I'm sure you'd know."

He registered the insult a lot quicker than Azula would have credited, and made for her with yellowed teeth bared in a snarl. She didn't bother to step back or ready any defense, as the brothers took hold of his arms to restrain him. "Knock it off, Lee," one of them cautioned, when the shipman in question shook him off. "Ye know what Rai said. She's off-limits."

"No _woman_ orders me," Lee fumed, but Azula knew he wouldn't press the issue when he took in the stony aspects of the other three. "I'll be in the hold, when you lily livers get done jawing with that stuck-up bitch." He took a lantern from one of the brothers, threw open the hatch with a bang, and disappeared down the steps.

The bare-chested brothers tugged at the edges of their vests, the equivalent of shrugging, and followed him a moment later. Only the bald captain lingered. "Ye'd best go above decks, girlie," he said, though not unkindly. "It be gettin' close down here."

"I'll be gone before you come back," she promised, and resumed her watching from the gun port. This seemed good enough for the captain, whose clomping steps descended the stair behind her, until Azula couldn't hear him anymore.

It couldn't have been more than five minutes before Azula finally saw the graying cook walk down the plank and cross the pier. She waited until Rai had reached the shore before she climbed out the gun port and down the side of the ship, dropping to the pier when she got close enough. She saw the woman duck down one of the wider alleys between the squat, weathered wood storefronts that dotted this seedy town.

And Azula followed her.

* * *

To say that Iroh was worried was a vast understatement.

His brilliant and deadly and dangerously unstable niece had escaped, and he got to hear this not from Zuko, but by messenger hawk from the asylum. He knew enough from his nephew's own letters to be aware that Zuko was scheduled to meet with his opposition on Ember Island at the time of her escape. And he knew his nephew well enough to know that Zuko would go after her.

He knew no more than this until he landed on the western coast of the Fire Nation, at a large port town abuzz with the news of a grisly murder. General Shin had chartered a boat, to all appearances fleeing the Fire Nation, and then been found dead inside it, his nose, a hand, and a foot severed from his body, castrated and cut in half at the waste. _The Five Pains_, Iroh reflected grimly. The character for "traitor" was carved into the back of his bald pate. Naturally, rumors abounded.

Some pointed to his acquittal by the war crimes tribunal as proof that he was a spy for the Earth Kingdom, gone to sell them Fire Nation secrets. The army had caught him, they argued, and duly executed him. Other nationals insisted the military would have dealt more quietly with a traitor in their ranks. His gruesome end spoke to making an example. They speculated he might have been killed by order of the Fire Lord — for his involvement in the recent escape of Princess Azula, or for testifying against her to the tribunal, no one could seem to agree. Still others said Zuko would never revive the ancient capital punishment. This had been done in retribution by supporters of the fugitive princess and her deposed father, Ozai.

The news only grew more troubling as Iroh neared the palace. He took a boat up the so-called "secret" river, and every passenger that boarded seemed to bring a new rumor with him, each one more outlandish than the last. That Fire Lord Zuko was amassing an army. He had declared war on the Earth Kingdom. No, he had gone into hiding with his family. No, the Fire Lady had fled the palace with his heir, Prince Lu Ten, while Zuko lay near death. No, she would divorce him for an adulterer.

Some said it was Ozai who'd been killed, assassinated by agents of the Dai Li in his cell … or burned to death by the young Fire Lord. It was public knowledge Zuko hated his father, after all. But why kill him now, others contradicted, and insisted rumors of his demise were fabricated to conceal his escape. Ozai had regained his firebending and fought his way out. Or no, the princess had freed him, and they were gone to the colonies to rally support for a coup…

They talked until Iroh's head ached, and he finally sought refuge in his humble cabin. Even in his reckless youth, Iroh had never been quick to anger, an unusual trait among benders of his element. But hearing so much slander and baseless speculation against his nephew made Iroh's blood boil. It was only his desire to enter the capital unnoticed that prevented him from speaking out against these ignorant gossips.

He would wait until he arrived at the palace, and then see what he could glean from the servants, Iroh resolved. They would know better than this lot just what had happened.

Iroh gained access to the palace through the kitchens, recalling that Mai had replaced most the staff there after one of the attempts on his nephew's life killed a royal taster instead. They had found the one responsible, but there was some doubt as to whether he had acted alone, leaving little choice but to bring in new workers. He still remembered how upset Zuko had been to dismiss so many loyal servants, even if they were generously compensated. Iroh didn't like it either, though it served his purposes now, as none of the new staff recognized him.

He secured a steaming cup of tea for himself, and a seat on a hard bench beside the sunlit doorway that opened on the herb garden. No one looked twice at him, with his generous belly and unassuming smile, the maroon robes he had chosen specifically because they resembled servants' smocks. These people needed to be more mindful, Iroh realized a little sadly. It was true, there had been no more assassination attempts since Lu Ten was born, and the Burning Throne secured for a new generation. But that was all too likely to change, now that Azula had escaped. Even if she didn't have designs on Zuko's life herself, the nearer possibility of putting her on the throne would be motivation for her latent supporters to act.

Still, their complacency served his purposes now, Iroh reminded himself. He sat, and sipped his over-steeped tea, and watched and listened. Kitchens were bustling places, and cooking, very social work. These servants, being especially nervous, also proved especially talkative. It did not take him long to learn what he needed.

That Zuko went off alone without explanation the night of Azula's escape, and only returned late the next morning, wounded and unkempt. He had been withdrawn and distracted ever since, and only gotten worse since a heated meeting with an Earth Kingdom delegation ended in threats of war, on both sides.

That Zuko visited his father in prison the night previous, to what purpose, no one knew. Ozai lay in the prison infirmary now, heavily sedated for his pain and making a slow recovery from severe burns over his chest and his arms.

That Zuko grabbed him and set him on fire in some kind of mindless rage. Ozai would be dead now if the guards hadn't come running at the sound of shouts, and pulled the hysterical youth off of him.

That Zuko had to be dragged from the cell, screaming abuses at his father. Even if Iroh hadn't known what he knew, he recognized this as a bad sign.

It got worse. The servants whispered that the Fire Lord had gone mad as his sister. That returning to the palace at daybreak, he burned his great bed and its priceless canopy to a smoking pile of slag and ashes they were still struggling to clean up. That he had locked himself in his study after, and refused to see or speak to anyone.

They anticipated mass banishments next, and a few had already started packing. It was another bad sign that Iroh couldn't tell if the servants were joking or not when they said things like this. And that he was afraid to ask.

Iroh heaved a weary sigh, and set his tea cup down on the bench, rolling ponderously to his feet. He made his way past the servants, who only now seemed to notice him as they were forced to avoid his girth in the rush of lunch time preparation. Iroh gained the quiet of a cavernous hallway, and followed the light of torches to what had been his father's study, and Ozai's after him.

He passed imperial firebenders stationed at regular intervals along the hallway, and raised on the tales of his early triumphs, several of these recognized him, bowing smartly with their gloved hands held fist to palm. He also passed the royal apartments on his way, and here he stopped at the sound of raised voices down an adjoining hall, one of which he never expected.

"What are you implying?" Mai demanded sharply of a plump woman in a bright red kimono, who shrank from the rebuke. Iroh recognized her as Lu Ten's nanny.

"Nothing, my Lady, of course, but," her chins wobbled nervously, she clasped sweaty hands, "it is almost the prince's lunch time —"

"Zuko knows his schedule," the Fire Lady said icily.

"Of course," she agreed again, shifting her feet. "But our Lord has been under such a strain, mightn't it be better if — he were not alone —"

"How dare you?" Mai spoke quietly, but there was steel in her tone, and the unfortunate nanny flinched like she felt the bite of it. "He loves that boy more than life." She fingered the edge of her sleeve, as if to reassure herself by the blades Iroh knew she secreted about her person. "He would sooner hurt _himself_, than let any harm come to his son."

The nanny gave her a despairing look, which Iroh could only guess meant she thought Zuko _would_ hurt himself. And Iroh wished, not for the first time, that he could have been here a lot sooner.

Mai caught sight of him standing at the end of the hall. "General Iroh," she greeted him, with her usual flatness of affect. The stout woman bowed her head and disappeared into the nursery, knowing defeat when she saw it.

"My lovely niece-in-law," Iroh returned, and she grimaced at the address. "Is my nephew still in his study?"

The angry line her mouth formed was all the answer he needed. "Talk to him," Mai said bluntly, and turned to leave. "He's making a mess of things."

And Iroh stared after her when she walked swiftly the opposite way down the hall, presumably back to the suite of rooms she shared with his nephew. He wondered at her harsh words, harsh even for her, and why Mai was not with Zuko right now, if he was so upset. He wondered just what that business with the nanny had been about.

He continued the way he had been going, and wondered again if he made the right decision, keeping certain aspects of their family from Zuko. Iroh suspected why his nephew had attacked Ozai, after so long and happy an estrangement. That it followed so closely upon Azula's escape could not be a coincidence, he knew.

And Iroh thought back to a few months after the war's end and the last time he visited his brother in prison, to put certain accusations to him…

_"Azula is mad," Ozai dismissed then. But his golden eyes watched his brother from behind the bars, with a caution that wouldn't be readily detectable to anyone who didn't know him so well. "She doesn't know what she's saying."_

_"Maybe not," Iroh replied with deceptive quiet, his tone hard. "But I do."_

_Ozai dropped the pretense of ignorance then, realizing, as he always did with a little reminding, that Iroh was the one person he couldn't lie to. "And what are you going to do about it?" he sneered, slouching casually where he sat on the hard pallet._

_And Iroh remembered that he had been just the same as a child, never clinging to falsehoods as most children would when caught in a lie, but admitting ugly truths with a studied disdain. As if lying were a game he chose not to play anymore, because it had lost its fun. A stale joke not worth examining further, and wasn't the other person a fool for paying any mind to it?_

_Iroh should have realized a long time ago that there was something really wrong with him. Iroh should have known that he could never be trusted with a child — _any_ child — even one so obviously suited to him as Azula. _

Especially_ one so obviously suited to him as Azula._

_Ozai was speaking again, and all he wanted to do was walk out of the chill darkness of this cell and forget he ever had a brother. But Iroh forced himself to listen. He owed his niece that much, he told himself. Even if his knowing would avail her nothing now._

_"It's over. I'm in prison," Ozai stated bitterly, brows forked in a scowl. "Azula will spend the rest of her life drugged in an asylum. So what remedy, you old fool?"_

_"I could tell Zuko what you did," Iroh put forth, so quietly he wondered if his brother would even hear him. _

_Ozai snorted with contempt. "Because his good opinion means so much to me."_

_"He would have you killed," Iroh concluded gravely, ignoring the interruption._

_"For the sake of a sibling he hates?"_

_Iroh just looked at him in the closest thing to pity he could muster. It _would _be beyond the comprehension of someone like Ozai how Zuko could love a person he had every reason to hate. But his sparing Azula and seeking her recovery were proof enough of that for Iroh. _

_Ozai turned a tight-lipped smile on him, as if guessing the train of his thoughts. "You overestimate his care for Azula. He only likes to _think_ he loves her. To convince himself he is better than her, better than me," he gestured to himself, "a noble and compassionate Lord. _

_"But if she ever recovered to threaten his precious _peace_," Ozai inclined his head to lend weight to his words, his eyes glaring fiercely beneath sharp brows, "if he ever got the chance to pay her back without guilt, or risk of public censure … well then, you would see his _true_ heart…"_

And Iroh stopped in his recollections, collecting himself instead for a talk what was long overdue. When he finally tried the paneled door, Iroh found it unlocked, and his nephew sitting on the floor in a corner of the sunlit study, his back to the wall and his knees propped up.

Zuko held a sleeping Lu Ten to his chest, rocking the toddler side to side while he whispered fiercely into his ink-dark hair. It might have made a tender scene, if not for tears streaking the haggard young father's face. And of his susurrations, Iroh could make out only pain, and a promise. No words were intelligible.

His nephew's bloodshot eyes lighted on him like a spark catching the second he entered the room. Iroh saw unreasoned anger flash in them, before Zuko softened with relief. "Uncle?" he croaked in a voice hoarse with weeping, like he hardly dared believe it.

"Nephew." Iroh returned his greeting warmly, though he had to force a smile for the first time in a long time, at the sight of the man he regarded like a son. Zuko was pale and hollow-eyed with sleeplessness, still clad in a traveling cloak creased with wear. His long hair hung loose, and a day's growth of stubble shadowed his jaw, interrupted by the bare ridges of his scar. It had not appeared so much like an open wound since the day Zuko received it, Iroh thought. His eyes were so red and irritated he might have tried to pluck them out of his head.

He looked like a wreck of a man.

The diminutive nanny appeared behind Iroh in the doorway, quiet as a cat, and caught his gaze meaningfully. And Iroh realized with a sickening jolt what she had been about to say, before Mai interrupted her. _Better if he were not alone _— with Lu Ten. She thought Zuko too unstable to trust with his own son…

Iroh grimaced and gave the briefest of nods to the graying nanny, clearing his throat. "It is almost lunch time," he said pleasantly, clasping his hands, and Zuko blinked up at him evident confusion. "Lu Ten will be hungry when he wakes," Iroh added gently, and his nephew seemed to catch sight of the nanny standing at the door for the first time.

"I for— I forgot," Zuko said haltingly. He shifted Lu Ten to his shoulder, one hand braced behind his head, to climb to his knees and then carefully to his feet. The young prince yawned and blinked contently. His face turned into his father's shoulder and little fists gathering handfuls of Zuko's hair and cloak. "I'm sorry."

"It's alright, my Lord." The older woman spoke softly, and Iroh saw the pity in her eyes when she looked on his nephew. She approached and held out sturdy arms for the child, her long sleeves trailing. And Zuko reluctantly parted with him, extricating his hair from Lu Ten's baby fingers.

The toddler whined faintly in protest when he woke in the crook of the nanny's arm, and his light eyes fixed on his father. "Da?" Lu Ten questioned, reaching for him when the nanny moved to leave, and Zuko's hand flashed out almost compulsively to stroke his hair. A tremulous smile spasmed across his nephew's face, and Zuko looked like he might cry again.

"I'll see to his care," the nanny promised in parting.

Zuko withdrew his hand. "Thank you," he whispered brokenly. And she left, taking the boy with her.

"Zuko," Iroh prompted kindly when the door closed behind her, laying a supporting hand on his nephew's shoulder. "Please tell me what is troubling you."

Zuko startled at his touch, and shook his head once hard as if to deny it. "I _can't_," he choked out, grasping his own elbows as if withdrawing into himself. Iroh let his hand drop with a quiet sigh. _So much for the direct approach_.

"The asylum wrote me that your sister escaped," he stated simply, and noted how Zuko glanced away at this. "Why did you not send for me?"

His nephew looked up in surprise. "I didn't think of it," he admitted slowly, as if amazed at the oversight. "I'm sorry."

_He keeps saying that_. "I heard what happened with your father," Iroh tried, edging the conversation onto more delicate ground.

Zuko had the good grace to look ashamed. "Mai told you," he said dejectedly, letting his arms drop.

It was not a question, but Iroh answered it anyway. "The servants were talking —"

"Does **everyone** know?" his nephew fumed bitterly, turning his back abruptly on Iroh to stalk to the bloodwood desk, littered with scrolls. Zuko bent to grip the edge of it, as if he would tear it from the paneled wall.

"They're servants. They talk," Iroh reminded him patiently, remembering that Zuko had never been particularly good with people, and couldn't be expected to know this.

"They know that you burned him," Iroh said, his tone carefully neutral. If Zuko sensed any blame, however imaginary, he would never open up as he obviously needed. "They just don't know why."

Zuko looked over his shoulder then, his eyes dark with pain, and it took Iroh a moment to realize his nephew was gauging him. "You should sit down," Zuko said hoarsely, but it was he who slumped into an elegantly carved chair before the desk. He bent to grip his head in shaking hands, his teeth clenched in anguish.

But Iroh stayed standing. He knew what Zuko was struggling to say, and he should not make him say it. Iroh knew how impossible it was to even think it, let alone put it to words. Maybe that was why he couldn't speak. No wise adage would come to him. He'd been dreading this moment for years, and now proved just as useless as he always feared.

Zuko spoke to the gray stone floor, his voice choked with tears. "I found out what — he **did** to — to _Azula_…"

It wasn't fair. His nephew fought so hard — _Iroh_ fought so hard — for the man Zuko was today. He only wanted his nephew's happiness. But how could Zuko be happy, when he was continually sabotaged by his father's crimes?

Iroh wished he saw an end to it, but he knew that even Ozai's death would not stop revelations like these. Azula told him three years and more ago, without even meaning to. He heard it in her soft words, read it in her fingers straining, eyes as empty as a doll's. Dead on the surface, screaming underneath. There was no limit to his brother's depravity.

"He abused her," Zuko brokenly echoed his thoughts. Tears streaked the right side of his face, his eyes fixed desperately on Iroh. "He — _violated_ her."

Iroh watched his nephew scar all over again. And he couldn't look away.

"You don't look surprised," Zuko said slowly after a moment, his white face gone still with suspicion. He lowered his hands and sat straight abruptly, his fingers clenching. "_Why don't you look surprised?_"

"Zuko…"

"You _knew?!_" his nephew shouted in outrage, surging to his feet so abruptly the chair turned over behind him. "You knew, and you didn't **tell** me?"

"What good would it have done?" Iroh said helplessly, spreading his hands. He felt helpless. "When I learned — the war was over, and your father was in prison. He couldn't hurt her anymore."

"Oh Agni," Zuko almost whispered, his eyes widening in sudden realization. "That's why, you stopped going…" And Iroh recalled his explanation at the time, the only one he could give. _Every time I see what has happened to her, it only makes me hate my brother more_.

"It was so _shameful_," Iroh admitted. "I could not even **think** about it, let alone tell anyone —"

"You could have told her _doctors!_" Zuko cried, his voice dangerously close to breaking. "They might have helped her, and she wouldn't have escaped! I wouldn't —" His nephew fell silent, stricken.

And Iroh stared when an awful possibility occurred to him. His crippling guilt, his secrecy, the hours Zuko disappeared, the state he returned in. The fact that after days of searching, not one of Iroh's contacts in a world-spanning secret society had reported seeing Azula…

It would have been self-defense, or an accident. It had to be, but Zuko would blame himself, Iroh knew. That was the kind of man his nephew was.

Iroh knew the kind of man his nephew was.

"Zuko …" he said almost fearfully, heart thudding painfully in his ears, "did you kill her?"

"_What?_ **No!**" Zuko took a quick step back in shock, as if Iroh had dealt him a physical blow. But his denial came swiftly enough that Iroh knew it was the truth. He tried not let his relief show. "My gods, how could you ask me that?"

"What else am I supposed to think, when you are acting so guilty?" Iroh finally demanded, thrusting out a callused hand. Frustration followed quickly in the face of his relief. He was too old for this. "Why don't you just tell me?"

"I don't want you to **look** at me like _Mai_ does!" Zuko burst out, but seemed to realize his mistake immediately. He paled visibly as Iroh considered, would the taciturn woman tell him what he needed to help his boy? He could not let things stand as they were.

"Please, Uncle," Zuko begged, grabbing Iroh's wrist as if to stop him, when he hadn't moved from the spot. "Just leave it alone." He looked almost scared, ashamed, terribly lonely. All things he had no business being.

Iroh gazed sadly at him, and laid his other hand over Zuko's, to soften words he knew his nephew wouldn't want to hear. "My nephew, you need to talk to someone —"

"Talking doesn't help _anything!_" Zuko insisted angrily, throwing off his grip. "I just have to **find** her!" He stalked away, crossing the cluttered study.

"You don't have to talk to _me_, but you need to talk to someone," Iroh addressed his back. "If you are losing control like this, burning your father —" Zuko kicked a wooden end table beside the door to splinters in a burst of flame, and Iroh began to understand why the servants lived in fear of his temper all of a sudden.

"_He deserved it!_" his nephew said savagely, turning on Iroh with his fists clenched and back bent as if ready to charge. "He deserves to _die!_ He deserves to **die** for what he _did!_"

Iroh schooled his expression carefully, as only years passed in a vicious court could teach him. It would not do to let Zuko see he thought the very same thing, when he found out. What his nephew was considering was political suicide. Instead, he ventured carefully, "How would you explain it, after all this time?"

"I'm the Fire Lord," his nephew bit out angrily, glaring into an empty corner. "I don't have to explain myself to anyone."

Iroh frowned. He had come to expect better from Zuko. "Your father said much the same thing once —"

Zuko jerked as if stung. "I'm **nothing**_ like him!_"

Iroh paused at the violence of his reaction. "I never said you were," he placated, feeling even more out of his depth.

"I'm not, I'm _not_…" Zuko insisted, turning for the door as if to flee. Instead he struck the door so hard with a fist that it rattled on its hinges, his other arm braced against it.

"Nephew, please listen to me," Iroh said earnestly, closing the distance between them. Zuko leaned his forehead against the door, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, his breaths harsh and unsteady, but he didn't try to move away. Iroh took that for a good sign, and reached out to give his shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

"If you kill him, Azula will never forgive you," Iroh warned him gravely. He felt Zuko shudder. "And … you will never forgive _yourself_."

Zuko lifted his head to look sidelong at Iroh, and whispered desperately, "She'll already never forgive me." His eyes were wide and horrified, as if fixed on something Iroh couldn't see. "I'll already never forgive myself. So why not?" He barked out a bitter laugh that cut Iroh to the core. "_Why not?_"

Iroh dropped his hand in shock. This was even worse than he'd guessed. "Zuko, **do not **do this thing," he ordered sternly, but his nephew only turned away to put his shoulder into the door, and then his back. Zuko slid down until he sat at its foot with his knees propped up and his head bent, in much the same attitude his uncle found him. But Iroh was not deterred.

"Remember who you are, remember how far you've come," he exhorted, kneeling beside the young man though it made his joints scream in protest. "Think back when we were fugitives in the Earth Kingdom, living out of caves, stealing to survive. You said once that there was no hope. Do you remember what I told you then?"

His nephew grimaced and made to turn away, but Iroh grabbed his shoulder, holding him fast. "You must never give in to despair," he said urgently, when Zuko reached up to cover his own eyes, crying silently. "Allow yourself to slip down that road, and you surrender to your lowest instincts —"

"I already did."

Iroh stopped when Zuko said this. Zuko stopped when he realized he said this, and sat up on his knees. His red eyes darted to Iroh's face in breathless horror, like he expected his uncle to turn from him as from some hideous deformity. When Iroh didn't, any reserve he had left crumbled, and Zuko looked on him in torment.

"Oh _gods_," he choked out, reaching for Iroh as helplessly as a blind man groping in the dark. And when his uncle reached back to steady him, he grabbed the old man in a clumsy embrace, clutched the back of Iroh's robe, and buried his face in his shoulder.

"Everything I **do** just makes it _worse!_" his nephew wept, voice muffled by the fabric of Iroh's robe. "Everything I do — just makes her_ worse_…"

His uncle hugged him quickly back, as much to restrain Zuko as to comfort him. He was shaking so badly Iroh worried he had made himself sick with guilt.

"I just wish — I could take it _back_," he whispered hopelessly.

But Iroh could not help him take it back. He didn't even know what it was.

All he could offer was a solid presence to hold on to. An ear to listen, when Zuko felt safe enough to confide in him. And years to give perspective to the trials of youth.

His nephew would survive this, he knew. Iroh would make sure of it.

Even if Zuko didn't.

* * *

The messenger hawk wheeled in a darkening sky, flying low to avoid the flicker of lightning through the clouds. It never thought to look down for the arrow that felled it, and plummeted in a flash of russet feathers to the alley adjacent.

Azula let down her borrowed bow, permitting herself an understated smirk at the accuracy of her aim. It was nice to see some skills were transferable. The ponytailed stallkeeper gaped at her, speechless where he stood before his meager wares.

Azula handed the bow back to him. "I've reconsidered," she said regretfully, her eyes smiling. "The grip is not to my liking."

"That was — the _post office _—" he sputtered in disbelief, not even seeming to register the sudden fall of rain on both their heads.

"Yes, you might start thinking how you're going to explain this," Azula acknowledged, reaching up with a sharp-edged finger to tap her lips in conspicuous thought. "Or acquire a taste for hawk meat."

Azula felt the tug of a small hand at her pants leg. She looked down.

"Why'd you kill that bird for?" a dusty little girl who reached about waist-height to Azula asked curiously. She wore a brown dress cut from roughspun cloth. Her feet were bare and her short hair hung loose, and when Azula didn't immediately reply, she wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

Azula crossed her arms, arching a brow at the hand that still gripped her white pants, and the guttersnipe was perceptive enough to let go. "I didn't like the way it was looking at me," Azula lied calmly to her. "Kind of like you're looking now." Her green eyes bugged. "Get lost, kid."

Azula didn't wait for her reply, instead loosed her arms and strolled through the warm rain into the alley. She found the dead messenger hawk lying beside a waste bin, the shaft of an arrow protruding from its breast and one wing folded under its body.

She wondered that the hallucination of her mother didn't appear to scold her for killing it, or threatening small children. She crouched beside the bird to remove the leather cylinder strapped to its scaly leg, and started to pry it open. Defenseless little creatures should know by now to stay away from her, Azula considered in mild annoyance. Even the stupid turtleducks had that much sense.

"— seen it! One shot and then _bam!_" Azula's jumped to her feet when the girl's shrill voice preceded her around the corner, and backed against the white stone wall. Clutching the cylinder to her chest, she sprinted the narrow expanse of the alley and halfway up the wall opposite, propelling herself with a backflip and whisper of flame from her heels to a roof overlooking the cobblestone alley.

She landed lightly in a crouch at the edge of the black slate roof, but its inclination was shallow enough that Azula didn't lose her balance, supporting herself with a splayed hand. Her amber eyes narrowed when the next moment, the little urchin came pelting down the alley, clutching a twig and trailed by two broad, tan men in grass-green tunics, trimmed in pale yellow. They stopped where the hawk had fallen. The little girl chatted excitedly up at the taller of the two men, while his bearded companion knelt to examine the bird.

At first she thought they might be workers from the post office, though that would be remarkable response time. Then she noticed they wore baggy yellow pants and leather shin guards, but their feet were bare. _Earthbenders. From the garrison perhaps, or some home guard_. She could think of no other self-respecting adult who would walk around barefoot in public. At least the Beifong girl had some excuse, using her feet to see as she did…

"See?" The middle-aged stallkeeper ran up behind them, then bent double to catch his breath. "It's just like — I told you," he panted, gesturing to the fallen hawk.

"I see a dead bird stuck with your arrow," the bender still standing turned to reply, giving the street girl a brusque push away when she tugged at the hem of his tunic. He furrowed rock-like brows that dripped with rain. "No sign of this woman."

"Why would I tell you at all, if I'd done it?" the stallkeeper snapped. "It was that little colonist, with her Fire eyes." The earthbenders exchanged a look that Azula couldn't decipher from her vantage.

"You sure this is a post bird?" said the man who examined it, standing from his crouch. "There's no letter attached."

"I watched it take flight. We're two blocks from the post," Ponytail argued, crossing skinny arms. "Girl watched it too, like she was _waiting_ for it. She probably took the letter."

"Wonder what's in that letter?" one earthbender said to the other, his voice low and gravelly over the soft fall of rain.

"Find the girl, and we'll find out," the bearded bender replied. "You're off the hook this time, Wei Jin," he dismissed the stallkeeper. "But you probably want to screen your customers more carefully."

"She wasn't a **customer**," Wei Jin grumbled, stooping to tug his arrow from the bird, and walk stiffly back to his stall. "She didn't even _buy_ anything…"

The scrawny little girl started poking the dead messenger hawk with her twig, and the earthbenders nodded to each other in silent agreement, ignoring her utterly. They took off at a jog down the alley, and split up at the next junction, taking the left and right forks out of Azula's sight.

Her mouth curled with contempt. A messenger hawk didn't think to look down. A dirtbender didn't think to look up. There was a metaphor somewhere in there that her uncle wouldn't appreciate. Father would, but he was in prison…

_Soon_, she promised herself. And him.

Now to see if her stunt was worth the trouble. Azula stood atop the roof, and the little girl looked up. She froze.

But the urchin only waved up at her with a cheerful grin, before dropping her stick and capering back the way she came. Azula stared after her, frowning. _What a fickle creature_. But she supposed most children would seem so, in comparison to her.

She picked her way carefully across the rain-slicked roofs of several contiguous shops and homes, gaining the shelter of a wooden water tower on stilts. Azula sat tailor style on the flat sandstone, with her back against one of the thicker stilts. She drew the scroll from its leather cylinder with her front two fingers, and opened it. Rai had gone into the post office, and this letter was winging its way westward, before Azula shot its bearer down…

She read the characters once through. And then again, more carefully.

_The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. But in the presence of princes, the cleverest jester is mute. Tens of thousands of bones will become ashes, when one general achieves his fame. But to forget one's ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without root._

_When the tree falls, the shadow flies._

_In shallow holes, badger moles make fools of dragons. The same water that bears the ship may sink it fairly. A person with a bad name is already half-hanged. But men in the game are blind to what onlookers see clearly._

_If White Lotus to Home Port, Boat seven tiles to Foreign Port, two tiles West. We strike for the interior. I trust this message to find you better than the first, and await your next move._

Her jaw clenched. It read like clumsy poetry on first inspection, but she recognized the ancient proverbs when she read them. This selection could not be happenstance, but meant to communicate some coded message.

Azula knew one other person who spoke in proverbs. And the scroll was addressed to Long Zhi. The jasmine dragon.

Her uncle.

The white hands that held the scroll clenched, and threatened to tear it asunder. It took all her willpower not burn the damned thing to ashes. _You already suspected her_, Azula reminded herself. _You saw it coming this time_. She wondered why that didn't dull the sting of betrayal.

"Priorities," she muttered darkly, glaring at the scroll. This cook was nothing to her. But her access to Iroh … Azula could use that. _Think_.

The most obvious subterfuge was the abrupt break from lyric form to communicate what looked like moves in a Pai Sho game. _Boat seven tiles to Foreign Port_, Azula read again, and scowled. To communicate her movements, more like. But the directions were far too vague, and wrong besides. They were sailing East.

Then she realized, if the directions were specific to a certain point of reference… _White Lotus to Home Port_. The White Lotus was Iroh's favorite gambit in his favorite game. _You, like most people, underestimate its value_, she could almost hear him admonish her again. _Not this time,_ she answered silently, and a grim smile curved her lips.

If Iroh was the White Lotus, then Home Port would be… _The palace._ Of course, Uncle would fly to darling Zuzu's side at the first word of her escape, Azula reflected scornfully. She wondered what clumsy lie Zuko would tell to cover his mistakes this time, and if Iroh and his friends would find him out. Mai had probably discovered the truth already, if she knew that knife-wielding traitor…

Azula blinked back a sudden burning in her eyes, swallowed past a tightness in her throat. Her uncle lived in Ba Sing Se now, she recalled, though she couldn't say just how she knew. That was probably where Rai sent her first letter, from Fire Fountain City. It was too late to intercept that one, and Azula had no way of knowing if it had been lost, or would be waiting for him on his return home.

She could destroy this one, and buy herself some time. But the cook was sure to send another when Azula disappeared. _You could kill her_, she considered, and dismissed the idea just as quickly. The last thing she needed was to leave a trail of bodies, or a trail of any sort. Unless…

Azula smiled. She could lay a false trail. All she had to do was figure out the Pai Sho coordinate system, and forge a copy of the scroll — with a few amendments.

She climbed to her feet, motivated by the prospect of misdirection, and stuffed the scroll and message cylinder into her pocket. Azula jumped from the edge of the low roof and back to the ground just as the rain let up, wending her way down cobblestone streets to the pier where her ship was docked. A ferret-faced barker with lips bigger than hers stood before one of the junks moored near the pier, dressed in green culottes and a sleeveless tunic, belted with a silk sash.

"Earth Nation, _Fire_ Nation, **Water** Nation!" he sang out, spreading skinny arms in welcome to passersby. "So long as bargains are your _inclination_, you're welcome here! Don't be _shy_, come on **by!**" He caught sight of Azula, and she quickened her stride, but he sprinted after her with surprising alacrity.

"I can see —" he began, making to throw an arm around her shoulders and compel her patronage.

"Try it and _die_," Azula bit out, and he shut up quickly enough after that. Withdrawing his hand, he made no move to follow her when she walked swiftly to her own pier and up the plank to the boom.

Azula saw no sign of the cook either ashore or aboard ship, and didn't seek her out, descending wood plank stairs to the cool, shadowed interior of the boat instead. Except for two deck hands and the moping kitchen boy, Azula encountered no one in the narrow halls, and gained the captain's empty cabin without resistance or any question as to her purpose.

In her experience, it was usually enough to simply _act_ purposeful, and no one would question your purpose. A lesson her brother could take to heart. She conceded it might be harder to manipulate appearances with a quarter of your face burned off, but Zuko didn't even _try_.

She closed the paneled door behind her, and turned to take in the cabin. It was more richly appointed than the cook's quarters, as she might expect. A bed with gold silk hangings was pushed up against one wall, and there were several shelves crammed with books, scrolls, and the occasional knickknack at the opposite end of the room. Ornate carpets covered nearly every inch of the wood plank floor, and thin sunlight fell onto the dark wood desk from the windows at its back.

Azula threw herself into the chair behind the desk, searching the drawers for… _A world map_. She spread it over the fine grain and secured its edges with two flat stones, black as jet. She snatched up a calligraphy set and laid it more comfortably to her left, and wetting a fine brush in the inkwell, divided the map width- and lengthwise with swift, sure strokes. These halves she divided into thirds, and each third into thirds, until she had laid the 18x18 grid of a Pai Sho board over the map.

The results were … rather disappointingly obvious. So much so that for a moment, Azula wondered whether the cook had meant her to intercept the decode the message after all. Could people really be this stupid? Azula wondered. She frowned, realizing she had no better explanation at the moment.

She rotated the map ninety degrees clockwise, so the Fire Nation was at Home Port, and traced slim fingers down the lines. She counted tiles, tracing a path up and across, and smirked. She rolled up the map and stuck it in her pocket, withdrew the cook's scroll from her other and smoothed it flat with the stones. Azula found fresh paper in the top right drawer, and laid this beside the original, but paused before she began her forgery.

Should she include the proverbs? she wondered again. Even knowing they pertained to her — probably — Azula couldn't be sure she had correctly guessed their meaning. The first line seemed to indicate that she was traveling under a false name, or that the message referred to her by another name, or both.

_But in the presence of princes, the cleverest jester is mute._ Rai had kept her silence, but she was not a jester, she was a cook. She cooked for the palace, Azula realized suddenly, before she ever served aboard this ship. Azula had to struggle to recall her round face bleached of color in the blue light of her flames, when Rai prostrated herself before the Burning Throne alongside the rest of the kitchen staff.

Her face had stayed curiously void of expression, when Azula pronounced their banishment. But something like relief glinted in her eyes when she rose to leave, and Azula noted it even then, filing away the incongruity for later review. Then everything else had happened, and she forgot —

_She didn't forget _you, Azula chided herself. _She knew you the minute she found you in the hold, but you overlooked her to your peril. Just like Mai and Ty Lee_… She stopped. This was a lesson she already learned. That she hadn't learned it four years ago couldn't be helped now.

The general probably referred to either herself or her father, but Azula didn't know what to make of the tree without root, when it falls, the shadow flies… She propped her elbows on the desk, and rubbed her temples with the points of her fingers. She could feel her headache coming back, annoying in its frequency.

_Badger moles, dragons_… A reference to her flight to the Earth Kingdom, most likely. _The water that bears the ship may sink it_. Her continued reliance on the cook might have defeated her, certainly. The bad name referred to was probably her own; Azula was under no delusions that she was anything like a popular figure in the Earth Kingdom. But half-hanged? Was she supposed to be in some danger here?

Azula sighed. She didn't have time for this guesswork. The captain and his crew would return from hawking their wares and resupplying in town soon, and she would be missed, if she wasn't discovered outright. She copied some of the proverbs and discarded others, and made some additions based on her memory of the ancient sayings, to maintain the loose rhyme scheme.

She altered the directions disguised as Pai Sho moves, and compared the two copies side by side, with a critical eye. She could tell no difference in the calligraphy, and the characters she had to extrapolate followed the general slant and emphasis of Rai's handwriting.

A forgery had gained her father his throne — with some timely intervention from her mother, she supposed. Now a forgery would gain Azula her freedom. _Dad always said it was a useful skill_, she recalled. That must be why he taught her so early.

Maybe she had broken some encryption with the changes, and Iroh would recognize her hand in this, but Azula was past caring. At best, she would successfully misdirect him. At worst, he would know that she knew he was hunting her. That crafty old bastard could do with a dose of humility anyway.

She rolled up the forged scroll and stuck it in her pocket beside the map, and then burned the original to ashes that she dusted from her hands. Azula knelt beside the door and peered under the crack to check for the passage of feet in the hall, and seeing none, slipped out into the abandoned corridor.

Azula was surprised then, on rounding the next corner, to practically run straight into the clashing captain. "Oh, there ye be!" he said uncomfortably, doffing his brown tricorn hat in the lamplight of the hall. "We be casting off soon, and yer cousin's in the galley, making a stew. She was lookin' for ye."

"What a coincidence. I'm looking for her, too," Azula lied smoothly, glancing aside when she stepped around him. "With both of us at it, I'm sure we shall eventually succeed." She left him to ponder that, and made straight for the cook's quarters instead, only stopping when she had shut herself inside.

Azula tore the sheet from her bed, and quickly bundled the clothes she wore on her escape into it, along with a comb and a bar of soap, the sturdiest pair of boots she could find — for when her sandals got to be a liability — and the leather pouch of coins she had seen Rai stash in the bottom drawer of the dresser one night, when the cook thought Azula was already asleep.

And she paused when it occurred to her this might be Rai's entire savings. _Let Iroh compensate her_, Azula thought coldly. He had a habit of rewarding failure. She dropped the coin purse into one of the boots, cinched the ends of the sheets in a knot, and walked out the door with her bundle clutched tightly in one hand.

It would be better to leave while the cook's duties still distracted her, but Azula's stomach chose that moment to rumble, reminding her of the need for food. She walked past the turn to the galley, and onto the gun deck instead, prying open the hatch to the hold and climbing down again. In day, the sunlight shining through the open gun ports actually managed to reach nearly to the bottom of the steep wood stairs, if only weakly.

Azula stepped into the darkness of the hold, and opened her hand to light a flame to see by. And the hatch closed with a bang behind her.

The fire died in her palm when she turned back the way she came, and the light from an oil lamp fell over her instead, illuminating its bearer. That lecherous sailor from the morning picked his way down the stairs on bare feet, a lantern in one hand and the blade she had broken off the halberd in his other, wrapped in sailcloth to blunt the edge where he held it.

"So," he drawled coldly, stopping near the bottom of the stairs with one foot set above the other, "little firebird decides to fly the coop." His black eyes narrowed hungrily. "If you was half as sharp as that _tongue_ of yourn, you'da never come back."

"Let me pass," Azula demanded, clutching the bundled sheet tighter in preparation to run. Even she didn't relish the prospect of firebending when she was hemmed in by wood planks and crates on all sides.

"Before you get what ye came for, _Princess Azula_?" he rejoined. She glared at him, and Lee grinned in triumph. "Ye won't be gettin' that, but you'll get what ye deserve. My offer still stands." He set the lamp down on the steps at his feet, to withdraw a rolled up paper from the waistband of his pantaloons. He let it fall open to display her image, and characters too tiny to read at her distance.

"But seein' as there's a price on yer head," Lee added smugly, casting the wanted poster aside into the dark, "I guess it's _you_ as will be payin' me. If ye please me," he offered, "I'll deliver ye **alive** to the king's justice. If ye don't, well …" He let the threat hang and left the lamp where he set it, to descend the stairs with her blade held ready before him.

Azula dropped the bundle, and blue flames licked at her clenched fingers, with a light colder and brighter than his oil lamp. A threat clearer and more eloquent than his would ever be. Lee scowled, his eyes flashing when he snatched up the lantern and angled it sharply down, to illuminate the floor at her feet. "I wouldn't try that if I was you."

And her eyes grew wide when Azula caught the dull green gleam of the blasting jelly that crusted the wood planks, and the white of the sheet where she dropped it. She didn't wait for him to reach her, but turned and ran into the dark, cursing him silently to herself. The fool would kill them both, and for what?

Azula needed to draw him away from the hatch before she could open it unmolested and escape, she considered, letting the flames die in her hands to make herself harder to track. She ducked down the aisles of crates, tracing the same path she'd tread a dozen times in the days she spent confined here, back to her hiding place —

She ran hard into the side of a crate where there shouldn't be one, fell back winded, and cursed _herself_ for a fool. Of course if he laid an ambush, he would cut off her route of escape. Azula barely turned before he was upon her. His coarse hands closed around her neck and squeezed so hard she thought he would snap it. He shoved her against the crate behind her, brutally banging her head for good measure.

Tears sprang to her eyes from the force of the blow, her head swam with lack of air when he forced Azula to the floor and straddled her, pinning her beneath his weight. He kissed her savagely, and she could feel him hard against her. Her fingers clawed uselessly at his beard, she arched and kicked futilely for purchase, unable to summon so much as a spark of flame.

Panic welled up to drown her like the water unseen all around them. He would kill her, he would kill her, and he wouldn't even stop. She would never leave the darkness of this hold, never see the sun again…

He forced his tongue in her mouth, and she bit down hard enough to draw blood. It was no defense her father ever taught her, but it served. He recoiled with a choked cry, loosed his grip on her throat, and Azula drew a swift breath. So that when he cursed her and pinned her by the neck, when his other hand grabbed for her breast, she was ready.

Setting Zuko's vest on fire hadn't worked that well. Setting this man's beard on fire yielded better results. He flailed back with a bellow of surprise, beating at the orange flames, and Azula scrambled out from under his legs. And when he drew the blade from where he must have tucked it in his waistband and came at her, she kicked it from his grasp.

She rolled swiftly to her knees to put some space between them, and threw the crouched sailor into the crates behind them with a concussive burst of flame. She lowered her arms, but lit a flame in her palm to confirm he was out. Lee lay unconscious at the foot of the wood crate, fallen facedown so the fire in his beard was stifled. He was still breathing, but blood seeped from a cut on his forehead.

Azula took ragged gasps, breathed deeply of damp air that smelled of mildew, and staggered to her feet to back away. But her head throbbed so painfully she could barely keep her balance, and she could still taste his blood in her mouth.

She bent double with hands on her knees, and vomited onto the wood planks. Azula stood to wipe her mouth with the back of one hand, holding her torn shirt together with the other. She shuddered, but chided herself all the same. When had she ever been this squeamish? It wasn't as if she killed him…

Azula was surprised to realize she actually wanted to kill him. Granted, she had only ever killed one person, and then only technically, since he came back to life. But she tried to kill that same airbender and his insipid friends multiple times on campaign for her father, so it was not an unfamiliar concept to her.

What was surprising was the wanting. She wanted to kill him. For Azula, it was not a matter of wanting to kill anyone. It was a matter of them needing to be dead. She allowed that her brother might be an exception. But then sometimes, she thought he just brought that out in people.

She lit the flame in her palm again, and considered her helpless attacker.

The bang of the hatch thrown open reached her ears, and she turned to face the new threat and clutched her torn shirt tighter. But it was only the stout cook who ran up to her, her lantern bobbing with each stride. She halted when the light fell over an unconscious Lee, and sucked in a quick breath.

"My gods," she whispered, horrified. "Are you hurt?" And Rai stepped closer, reaching for her —

"Why? Come to **finish** the job, you filthy _traitor?_" Azula seethed, and she stopped short.

Her face fell in the warm light of the oil lamp, when she spied the scroll sticking out of Azula's pocket. And she said quietly, "You weren't supposed to find out this way."

"How was I supposed to find out?" she demanded bitterly, seizing hold of the forged scroll to brandish it at Rai like an accusation. "When my uncle came to haul me away in **chains?**"

"I know you — you won't believe this," Rai said haltingly, tears shining in her eyes. _Oh, she's good_, Azula thought scathingly. "But — I wanted to help you."

"You wanted to help _yourself_," Azula spat, and interrupted when the cook made to protest, "Oh, don't deny it. Everyone's like that. Just not everyone admits it."

"You don't know what dangers you face in the Earth Kingdom," she contradicted urgently. "Their courts have sentenced you to death, given any man to right to carry out your sentence. There are more like him out there, Princess," she gestured disgustedly to the felled sailor. "And not all of them will act alone. Neither should you."

"What would you have me do?" Azula rejoined. "Go back to _Zuko? _That's just another kind of prison."

"Your uncle —" she tried.

"— thinks I'm a **monster**. He never raised a finger to help me. Why should he start now?"

Rai looked more than a little pained, when she lowered her oil lamp in what appeared to be a placating gesture. "He would do right by you," she insisted quietly. "He's a good man —"

"He's a _fool_ and a hypocrite, as big a **fraud** as my _brother!_" Azula denied, so hotly her hands shook with rage. "His help is a **box** shut away from the sun, and more _drugs_ than I can count on both hands! If he wants to help me so badly, he can go _die in a fire!_"

The cook just gazed sadly at her, the sort of look her mother used to give her when Azula said something unkind. "If I can't convince you to stay," she said slowly at last, "will you at least let me give you some money, and food for your journey?"

"You have nothing to give me I haven't already taken," Azula stiffly replied, and met her gaze evenly, noting her lack of surprise at the theft.

"As you say, Princess," she meekly replied, inclining her head. Azula glared daggers at her, and thought, _Be thankful it wasn't your _life_ I took, traitor_. But she couldn't bring herself to say it.

"Tell my uncle what you will when he comes," Azula dismissed her wearily, lighting the forged scroll aflame. She let it fall to the floor, where it curled up and crumbled to ashes. "You know nothing that could harm me."

Rai didn't reply, just stood where she left her among the crates and burlap sacks, with the lantern clutched in both hands. Azula strode back the way she came, stooping to retrieve the bundled sheet on her way out of the hold.

She didn't stop to gather any provisions. There was a sour taste in her mouth, and it made her feel sick all over again to be down here in the damp and the rot with _these people_. Azula took the stairs two at a time and slammed the hatch closed behind her when she reached the gun deck. There was no lock on the latch, but she could thread a rope through it, and knotted this securely to prevent Rai from following her.

She gained the open sky of the weather deck, and ignored the bustle and shouted commands of pirates adjusting the rigging or navigating their course into the mouth of a river. She held her torn shirt together with one hand while she walked swiftly aft, her eyes fixed straight ahead and jaw clenched. One of the barrel-chested brothers from the morning elbowed his twin when she passed, and they stopped in their work to gape at her state of partial undress. But neither dared ask what had happened before she was gone.

The lifeboats were hung from pulleys off the back of the stern, one to either side of the windows into the captain's quarters. Azula set down her bundle and leaned over the rail to grip one of the ropes in her right hand, while she frayed it with a careful flame from two fingers of her left. She applied the same treatment to the rope that supported the stem of the boat, and tugged gently on both to test their strength.

Azula nodded once to herself and took a deep breath, considering that if this didn't work, she was going to end up very wet. She grabbed the bundled sheet, and vaulting over the rail, jumped into the lifeboat.

The cords snapped simultaneously enough that Azula managed to stay afloat when she hit the water below, though the splash soaked her and left a solid inch of seawater in the bottom of the lifeboat. She knew this because the back end fell a little before the front, and the jolt of impact threw her off her feet and practically face-first into the floor.

It worked though, she saw, climbing painfully to her knees to look back the way she'd come. No one had time to come looking for her yet, while the boom kept its slow progress upriver, hemmed in by mountains on one side and fertile farmland on the other. No one appeared at the back of the ship to witness her escape. _Best keep it that way_, Azula reminded herself.

She climbed over one of the wood plank seats to reach the front of the tiny boat, and held her hand out over the water to heat it, and raise steam to cover her escape. Sweat beaded on her forehead, as much from the concentration and effort required to heat such a large volume of water so quickly as from the rise in temperature. She took a moment to wonder how waterbenders made this look so easy.

When she couldn't see the ship any more and was confident no one on it could see her, she lay back against the side of the boat, and let the current out of the mouth of the river bear her away. The steam would have seared her lungs if she were not a firebender, and conditioned to withstand extremes of temperature.

Even so, every breath hurt. Her wet clothes clung to her like a second skin, heavy and ill-fitted. Her eyes watered. The back of her head ached. She leaned it against the edge of the lifeboat, and waited.

Not for rescue, as most passengers might do on such craft. She knew how that would end, had always known. Even if she denied it to herself.

She didn't know why she denied it to herself.

The sun beat down unseen, a sourceless light amid the swirl of vapor and quiet _slosh_ of the waves. The steam condensed to a chill dew on her skin. And Azula still didn't know.

* * *

**If you're thinking right now that she must have a target painted on her forehead, or somewhere a little further south ... sorry. This won't be happening every three chapters, I promise.**

**And I didn't originally plan for events to go down that way. But it occurred to me I ought to follow up on the exchange at the end of the first scene, or it would just be so much filler. And I didn't want Azula to escape without being made to confront her betrayer, so we could gain that insight into her emotions and worldview. And the attempted rape accomplished both purposes, so yeah. I hope you liked it anyway, or (considering the nature of events) at least found it plausible. At least she got a better outcome this time. The pirate ... not so much.**


	11. The Chase

**If you're ****amazed that this is out a scant week+ after my last update, you should know there are two reasons for that: 1) This is a shorter chapter, comparable to Chapter 5, From Azula, in that it sets the stage for future developments and wraps up (for the immediate future) some dangling plot threads, and 2) ****the Gaang (particularly Toph and Sokka) are SO MUCH FUN to write. I'm curious to know what you think of them here, since this is the first time I've portrayed them all together, and the group dynamics get interesting. And you know what that means ... Please leave a review!**

**Thanks so much to my three readers who reviewed last chapter; I love you guys for it. Given the (relative) scarcity of reviews last chapter, I'm not sure how well this might work, but I'm going to give it a try. Something of a competition this chapter:**

**I am an avid Troper (tvtropes_dot_org) and Sokka consequently reads as the Avatar equivalent of a Troper. There are at least six TV tropes whose names are quoted word for word in his narration. Give the name of the trope (or tropes) you find in your review, and I will answer any question you wish about the story via PM. That is, of course, assuming I CAN answer your question(s), because I've planned that far ahead and/or have decided on what to do with that character/plot point/etc. One question per trope found please, and make sure to check previous reviews to avoid double entries. If you find multiple (named) tropes, naturally, you can ask that many questions. Competition will go on (assuming anyone engages in it) until all six tropes are found.**

**Whether or not you decide to join in the spirit of competition, I hope you like the comic relief provided by the Gaang this chapter. We're going to get back to some grade-A angst in Chapter 12 so ... enjoy it while it lasts.**

**EDIT: Competition update - four of the six tropes have been found (Manly Tears, Missing Mom, Scarily Competent Tracker, Sickeningly Sweethearts) along with a few more I overlooked in my original inspection (Visual Pun, Vengeful Spirit, Clean Cut, Surrounded By Idiots). Two tropes left for the finding, if you want to look...  
**

* * *

The wind from their passage tugged at Sokka's wolf tail — and Toph clutched tighter to his arm — when Appa angled his great horned head down to land them in one of the palace's gardens. He guessed it had been a while since Toph had to fly anywhere, and she'd never been much of a fan. His wife seemed to have other ideas though, when he glanced to where she sat in the back of the howdah and Suki mouthed _she likes you_ behind Toph's back. Sokka replied with an obscene gesture, impressively pulled off with one hand when it would usually require two, and she snickered.

Appa touched down a little roughly on the perfectly manicured grass of the walled garden, near a fountain topped with the figure of a dragon that lay at its center. While large, the lawn was divided down its considerable width by shaded porticoes, and a black stone walkway lined with low shrubs. He wondered why Aang had chosen to land here, when Sokka climbed off the sky bison behind Toph, who bounded gratefully back onto solid ground, and the bare-faced Suki, who shouldered their packs to slide down Appa's furry side.

He didn't have to wonder long. After Aang had fulfilled his usual sickeningly sweethearts routine of helping Katara off her seat, the lanky airbender ran to the nearest tree to pluck a low-hanging fruit from its branches, with a gusty laugh. "See, buddy?" he shouted to the bison. "I told you there were apples."

He threw one to Appa, who munched noisily on it before loosing a belch wholly disproportionate to the size of his snack. The noise stopped an arriving servant in his tracks, but the old man in a crimson smock gathered his courage, and managed to approach within a few yards of Appa.

"Avatar Aang," he greeted the airbender formally, bowing with his veined hands held fist-to-palm, "we are honored by your presence. The Fire Lord is in a meeting with his advisers, but asked that you be escorted to him immediately upon your arrival. If you will allow me?"

"Sure!" Aang grinned and airbent the howdah from Appa's back to set it down on the springy grass, while Suki left their packs for servants to bring to their rooms. "Take a rest, buddy," the airbender took his leave of Appa, with an affectionate scratch of his furry head. "You've earned it." Appa gave a low groan of agreement and rolled onto his back, his six legs waving in the air while the servant looked on helplessly.

The old man led them into the palace proper, and down cavernous halls of dark stone floors that gleamed like glass and echoed with every footstep, and paneled walls hung with portraits and tapestries. Sokka wondered again how Zuko could ever live in such a hollow home, but then recalled that what he'd seen of the royal apartments was not exactly homier, and but at least more comfortable than this.

Not that the lamplit halls weren't awfully familiar by this point, as many times as they'd called on Zuko over the years. What had it been, two weeks since they were last here together, for the anniversary of war's end? Not even. Zuko had shown them his son, beaming every bit as proudly as the first (and second, and third) time Sokka had laid eyes on little lump of baby fat who was heir to the Burning Throne.

Sokka remembered pretending to be a prince once, to impress Yue. Having got to know Zuko a little better since then, he concluded it would probably actually suck to be royalty. He would have to endure endless boring meetings with self-interested advisers and people complaining about a bunch of stuff that wasn't even his fault. Not to mention the less obvious problems, like missing Mom, genocidal Dad, sister who wants to kill you and anyone who so much as looks at her wrong…

He found himself wondering if dysfunction was some kind of prerequisite for royal families. Yue's family had seemed normal enough, if you discounted her white hair and the fishy circumstances of her birth — _Fishy_. Sokka grinned at the fortuitous pun. He would really have to start writing these down. At least the memory of his first love made him feel more like smiling than crying manly tears now. He wondered when that had happened?

"Guys," Aang whispered behind him, when they passed a couple of palace servants who bowed a little too deeply before scurrying away with glances over their shoulders, "why do I keep feeling like we've come to free some village from a vengeful spirit?"

"Maybe 'cause you've seen that look before," Sokka pointed out, frowning after the nervous Fire nationals. "On the faces of villagers plagued by a vengeful spirit."

The servant leading them parted the flame insignia on the curtain that opened on the throne room, to usher them inside. Sokka noted quite a few worried faces seated before Zuko, who headed the conference table rather than take his usual seat on the Burning Throne. He appeared to be absorbed in conversation with his uncle, who Sokka noted on closer approach looked like he'd aged about ten years since the last time they saw him.

"Zuko," Iroh was attempting to placate the young Fire Lord to his immediate left, his voice heavy with weariness, "you can't think —"

"Think _what?_" Zuko cut him off, jumping to his feet in anger._ "_That I sold my **sister** to those bastards? I _know_ I did!"

One of the royal advisers flinched visibly at his reaction, and the rest wore expressions even more pinched and cautious than the servants they encountered in the halls. Sokka began to have his suspicions just why everyone looked so unhappy around here.

"Uh, hey man," he greeted Zuko, hoping to defuse some of the tension. No such luck.

"Where the hell have you _been?_" Zuko snapped, turning on them instead, and evidently failing to notice when the rest of the gang looked as put out as Sokka felt.

Iroh sighed quietly, dismissing the advisers with a practiced gesture of his hand. They filed out with conspicuous haste, while the Dragon of the West remained seated.

"Gee, nice to see you too," Toph jibed for all of them, with her usual flair for visual puns.

To his credit, Zuko looked appropriately abashed at the reproach. "I'm sorry, it's just —" He glanced aside, and Sokka spotted a muscle twitching in his jaw even in the firelight of the throne room. "You don't know how hard it's been, waiting here alone."

"Yeah, Sparky," Toph agreed in a tone rich with sympathy, crossing her arms over what was shaping up to be an ample bosom. "No one can understand."

"Thank —" he started emphatically, before he caught sight of the growing smirk on Toph's angular face, and sighed. "I walked right into that one, didn't I?"

"It's okay," Katara said casually, walking up between Sokka and Toph to approach him. "We all kind of expect it by now." Then she frowned, her gaze fixing on a subtle line beneath Zuko's right eye that Sokka only noticed when she did.

"How did you get this? From Azula?" Katara asked, and Zuko nodded uncomfortably. "It's such a clean cut," she remarked, stepping close enough to run the tips of her fingers over the edge of the mending wound.

"She used this," Zuko volunteered in answer to a question she hadn't asked, pulling the ornate pin from his half-topknot and holding it out to Katara, apparently for the sole purpose of putting some space between them. "Or one like it," Zuko amended awkwardly, when she took it from him. "I um, didn't look for the pin, after —"

He stopped, and blushed furiously. Sokka stared.

And Aang breezed up to him, waving a long-fingered hand experimentally behind the Fire Lord's head. "You let her get _this_ close?" he asked Zuko in disbelief. "Woah, bad idea!"

"What was I supposed to do, throw a **net?**" Zuko said caustically, taking a step back from the couple. "I was trying to _capture_ her!"

"And how'd that work out for you?" Sokka deadpanned.

Zuko grit out, "Not. Well."

"So Crazy Bitch cut ya, huh?" Toph recapped. "Isn't that more Mai's thing? Hey, wait a minute." She paused, and shifted a bare foot on the black stone tiles as if reaching out with her earthsense. "Where _is_ Tall, Dark, and Pointy?"

Zuko looked, to Sokka's distinct discomfort, like he was about to start crying. "She and — and Lu Ten are staying with her parents," he managed. "For a while."

"But her parents live right across the street," Toph pointed out, to the sound of Suki palming her forehead.

"I **know** that, alright?" Zuko exploded, flames licking at his clenched fists. "I don't want to _talk_ about it!"

"Geez! What are you, on your _period_ or something?" Toph crabbed. "You're worse than **Katara**, and at least she has an excuse once a month!"

"_Hey!_" Katara objected, her eyebrows forking in that telltale V that said she was about to go off on somebody.

"Even if she needs one _every day_," Toph muttered under her breath.

"Guys, let's remember why we're here," Aang interposed nervously, physically stepping between blocky Toph and a clenchfisted, fuming Katara to head off a confrontation. "Zuko," he addressed him a little desperately, "what happened with Azula?"

"She escaped from the asylum," he replied, in a tone that said they should already know this. "I found her, and fought her, and — she escaped," he finished lamely.

Sokka raised his hand, and Zuko looked on him in undisguised irritation. "_What?_"

"I know you're our friend now, but … I seem to remember you being a scarily competent tracker once. You know, following us and Aang all over the world come rain, shine, or fireballs? So … if she escaped, why didn't you follow her?"

Zuko glanced at his uncle, who had watched the proceedings in silence so far, and gave no sign of acknowledgment now. "She — she knocked me unconscious," he admitted in a small voice, his shadowed eyes fixed on the floor.

Sokka looked at Toph. Toph frowned, and didn't say anything. He gave a low whistle of amazement that caused Zuko to look up sharply.

"And didn't _kill_ you?" Sokka added to the end of that statement. His eyebrows arched in disbelief. "You know," he stroked his chin thoughtfully, "I'm kinda starting to doubt her resolve."

"Sokka," Suki chided from beside him, laying a hand on his arm, "don't make light of it. Can't you see he's upset?" She gestured toward the clenchjawed Zuko, but Sokka was less than sympathetic.

Something about this just didn't add up, and it was starting to piss him off. That, and insane-firebending-princess-escapes-to-threaten-lives-again. There was also that. "I mean, she has him _right there_ in front of her —" he gestured to demonstrate.

"She's _crazy_, alright?" Zuko shouted at last, bringing his fists down as if to slam them on a table and silence debate. Sokka got the distinct impression this was exactly the way that meeting had been going when they walked in. "I don't **know** why she does _anything!_"

Toph sucked in a quick breath, unnoticed by any of the others in the spectacle of Zuko's outburst, but Sokka glanced at her. A lie? he wondered. But why would Zuko lie about that?

Iroh climbed ponderously to his feet, and cleared his throat. "Your friends have come a long way, Zuko," he pointed out gently, clapping a hand on his nephew's shoulder to calm him down. "And they are tired. We are all tired." And he certainly looked it. "Why don't we get to the point?"

When Zuko made no objection and only slumped his shoulders hopelessly, Iroh addressed the group as a whole. "My contacts in the Order are keeping eyes out for Azula. But so far, they have not written us with any news of her whereabouts. Neither have Zuko's spies or provincial governors. But it is only a matter of time before she's found —"

"You _have_ to find her first," Zuko cut in urgently, lifting his head. "If the Earth Kingdom catches her, they'll kill her."

"No way," Aang said stoutly. "The tribunal agreed to a maximum of life in prison. And you said it yourself, she was a minor, and certified insane. Once she's tried, you can probably get her sentence reduced."

But Zuko shook his head. "Her sentence is already passed," he bit out. "They went behind my back, got her reassigned or something. They tried her in some **backwards** Earth Kingdom court, she wasn't even _present_ to defend herself!" he complained bitterly, for what — judging by Iroh's lack of reaction — was far from the first time.

"I gave them everything they ever **asked!**" Zuko raged helplessly, glaring at the black stone floor. "Why can't they just give me my _sister?_"

"Zuko —" Iroh began wearily, but Toph held up a hand for silence. "Don't sweat it, Gramps. I got this."

She turned to his nephew and said, "You can bang your head against a wall all you want, Sparky. It ain't gonna crack. It's **hard**," — she forked a thumb at herself to demonstrate — "you're _soft_," — then pointed to Zuko. "Find a way _around_ it," she concluded matter-of-factly, and pantomimed walking with two fingers of her right hand.

The space of a blink was all the time it took Iroh to recover his composure. "Well said, young lady," he complimented Toph warmly, tucking his hands in the sleeves of his robe.

"Thanks, old guy. I think you're starting to rub off on me," she returned, punching the air as if it were Iroh's beefy arm.

Zuko took a deep breath, and admitted, "You're right. And we're doing just that." He nodded toward his uncle. "We've got a team of lawyers looking into her status as unlawful combatant, trying to get her conviction overturned…" He trailed off, and his mismatched eyes settled on Suki in what looked like unspoken accusation.

"What?" she said uncomfortably, when the rest of them looked at her too.

"Nothing," Zuko said slowly, in a tone that indicated it was anything but. "Just … you told me Azula only threatened your warriors to get you to talk. But somehow she gets slapped with a torture charge. Any idea how that happened?"

"You're out of line —" Sokka warned, moving to step in front of Suki before she stopped him with an arm thrust sharply in his way. She addressed her reply to Zuko though.

"Out of respect for you, I never made any statement against Azula," Suki coldly informed him, letting her arm drop. "But I'm not going to ask my girls to lie on her behalf. I don't think even _you_ believe she deserves that."

When Sokka saw he actually meant to argue the point, he'd had enough. "What do you care anyway?" he demanded, before Zuko could air any more ridiculous accusations. "She tried to kill you and your uncle and practically everyone in this room! You ask me, the Earth Kingdom'd do us a **favor **making her a head shorter."

Zuko had not said much about his sister, since he shipped her off to the loony bin. And what he did say wasn't very complimentary. So Sokka was understandably surprised when Zuko came at him with fists leaking fire and eye streaming tears to demand, "Take it **back!**"

Sokka was surprised enough that he had only managed to get (absurdly) his boomerang to hand before Iroh jumped between them, moving with impressive speed for such an old man. "ENOUGH!" he roared, and grabbing hold of Zuko's fist with one hand and Sokka's boomerang with the other, he pushed them apart.

"These are your **friends**, Zuko! Come here to _help_ you!" he barked at the Fire Lord, gesturing to the shocked Team Avatar in illustration while Zuko's flame headpiece fell unremarked from a topknot coming swiftly undone. He spared a hard glance for Sokka though, and added under his breath, "Even if some of them would do well to remember that."

And Iroh admonished his nephew, "**Stop** treating them like your enemies!"

His scarred face had gone still and white as a sheet at his uncle's rebuke, and Sokka thought for one tense second that Zuko would shout right back at him. But then the Fire Lord retreated a step and sat down hard on the edge of the low conference table, hid his face in his hands, and wept.

Aang was dumbstruck. Toph only sighed, not dreamily or regretfully, but in more of a surrounded-by-idiots kind of way. Suki and Katara exchanged simultaneous moist-eyed glances before flocking to either side of Zuko and pinioning him in a hug.

And Sokka felt like a jerk. He also felt deeply uncomfortable at the sight of a grown man crying, but mostly, he felt like a jerk.

He guessed that even if she _was_ a crazy bitch, she was his sister, too. Of course that was what Zuko would think of, when it looked like she was going to die. Zuko had got this way when she starved herself too, Sokka recalled, and thought that he should have remembered that sooner.

His wife actually shot him a reproachful glance from where she sat hugging Zuko, and that decided it. Sokka cleared his throat. "Uh, listen," he began awkwardly, "I guess I shouldn't have said that about … cutting her head off." Spirits, it sounded even worse on repetition. "I'm sorry."

"I'm sor— I'm sorry, too," Zuko managed, stanching his tears to sit up straight, and shrug the ladies' arms off of him. "I've just — been under so much stress since —" He looked around at them with bloodshot eyes, as if to reassure himself they were actually there.

"I'm so glad you're here," he barely broke a whisper, his low voice painfully sincere. "I'm so glad — you'll help…"

"We'll always help you," Katara said kindly, and Suki nodded in agreement, all insult forgotten. Sokka wondered idly why she couldn't forgive _him_ that quickly when he said something tactless. But seeing how tenderly she looked on the red-faced Fire Lord, it occurred to him that maybe crying wasn't such a bad tactic after all…

Nah, he could never pull it off. It would be like Toph shoe-shopping. No one would buy it.

"I can't — search for her myself or — or send my men beyond the borders of the colonies. Not without — the Earth Kingdom interfering. Will you bring her home safe to me?" Zuko asked Aang, as the nominal leader of their little group.

Suki and Katara watched him expectantly too, as if lending the weight of their approval to his request. Sokka reflected again on the idiocy of investing this much time, emotion, and debate into someone as damaged and dangerous as Zuko's psycho little sister. But he knew better by now than to voice those doubts in present company.

"Please, Aang," Zuko said quietly. "I don't want her to die."

"Of course," Aang reassured him, obviously moved.

"Uh, that's nice, but …" Sokka cut in, and was honestly relieved when his wife and his sister didn't glare at him for it. "What if she, you know, _tries to kill us?_"

"It **has** been known to happen," Toph added casually, throwing up her arms for emphasis.

Sandwiched between Suki and Katara, Zuko slumped visibly at the reminder. He searched the faces of his gathered friends in something approaching desperation, before he spoke in reply, "I don't expect you, any of you, to risk your lives for her. But…" He paused painfully. "She's crazy. And scared, and alone. Please just — remember that, if she does anything too desperate, or," he practically choked on his words, "_says_ anything too desperate."

Sokka exchanged a significant glance with Toph … as one-sided an exchange as he might expect. But he did catch the frown she turned on Zuko, as if the same nameless something that was bothering him about this bothered her too. He would have to talk to her later.

"This search will keep until morning," Iroh said firmly, tucking his hands in his sleeves again. "And you have all come a long way. Why don't you get settled in your rooms, and we can sit down to a friendly dinner, and speak of happier things?"

Sokka joined in the low murmur of assent that rippled through the group, and offered Suki a hand up when Katara climbed to her feet. He stood close enough not to miss it, when Iroh spoke quietly to his nephew, "Zuko, a word."

The young Fire Lord followed his uncle away from the conference table, as biddable as a polar dog all of a sudden. Suki walked on ahead, to talk to a beckoning Katara on the way to their guest rooms.

And Sokka couldn't help but notice that Zuko looked, for all his thanks, even more miserable than when they arrived.

* * *

The long-abandoned mill sat dark and vacant behind her, when Azula dug heels into her stolen mount, to direct it into the shallow stream that ran alongside, and cut a glittering path through moonlit meadow grass. The ostrich horse knew better by now than to balk at her commands, and stepped into the rushing water with the merest _squawk_ of protest.

The smelly fowl got the hang of running through mud and over water-slicked stones with some judicious application of a fire whip. Soon enough, Azula didn't have to devote every waking moment to guiding its path and could dwell on other things. Like how empty her stomach was feeling right now.

It was a mistake not stopping to grab provisions, she could admit that in hindsight. After voiding her stomach in the mildew-scented dark of the hold, Azula had felt like she might never be hungry again. And the smell off this probably flea-infested bird wasn't doing wonders for her appetite either. But she was hungry, no denying it.

And oddly enough, it wasn't a bowl of her favorite cherries or the spice of smoked fish, sloughing off the bone and fresh from the palace kitchens, that occupied her thoughts. It was that thick, hearty stew Rai served her first night among the crew. What had that had in it? Leeks, potatoes? Azula couldn't remember, only that it was the best thing she'd tasted for four years.

Azula should have walked off that ship at Fire Fountain City, and never looked back. She had been discovered. She knew how that would end. So why did she stay? She had asked herself that a dozen times since the cook betrayed her, and now thought she knew.

Not for Rai's company, certainly. Azula ought to have her traitor's tongue out just for the presumption she showed. No, worse still, it was to eat food that didn't taste the same every day, and lay her head on a pillow at night, and take a bath — an actual _bath_ — without unwelcome supervision…

She snorted with disgust at herself, and dug heels into the ostrich horse again, to urge it faster over the river stones. If she let such base considerations drive her, she would be no better than her hedonist uncle. Far better she had been betrayed now and so incompetently, than continue that way. It was that kind of complacency that would get her captured, or killed. Neither of which she could afford.

Her father was counting on her. Her country was counting on her. She could not make these kind of mistakes.

Out of sight of the mill for some time now, Azula pulled hard on the reins to stop her mount in the middle of the burbling stream, and climbed down, shouldering the burlap bag she had taken along with the ostrich horse. The cool water rushed over her too-large boots, when she checked that Rai's sheet was still knotted securely to the saddle. Her meager possessions safely transferred to the new pack, she tore the sheet to account for their seeming loss, and slapped the haunch of her stolen mount.

Happy though it may be to get away from her, the ostrich horse was tired, and only trotted out of the stream and off toward the low foothills. Azula frowned after it. That wouldn't do. When her uncle or Zuko's hired knives followed this trail, it would have to look like she was fleeing pursuit. She ignited azure whips of flame to give it the necessary motivation, until the beast had fled, squawking indignantly, beyond the practical range of her fire.

Azula let out a long breath, and turned back the way she came. When her true pursuers — for she didn't doubt they would come — followed the smoke or local reports to the burned out husk of the abandoned mill, they would find that she steered her ostrich horse into the stream to cover her tracks. What they probably wouldn't guess was that she had doubled back, or that in truth, she reversed the sequence of events.

Far more obvious would be her riderless mount and torn satchel, indicating capture. With any luck, her pursuers would waste time looking for whomever they thought took her, while Azula herself escaped their notice. It was too bad about losing the ostrich horse though, especially after Mother gave her so much grief —

Azula stopped dead in her tracks, and pressed the heel of her hand hard into her forehead. **Not** her mother. _It_. It wasn't real. It would be gone soon. She didn't speak to it. She didn't acknowledge. She'd be damned if she started regressing now…

"Azula, these people never did anything to you," she could almost hear it admonish her gently, just as it had when she led the ostrich horse away from its stable in the growing twilight, away from the tantalizing hint of roasting meat borne on the breeze from the tiny cabin that housed its owners.

She walked faster now, splashing carelessly, as if to outstrip the memory. _There was nowhere she could run from this. She knew that_…

"They never did anything _for_ me either," Azula snapped at it then in frustration. "So what do you imagine I owe them?"

The hallucination had just watched her sadly, looking as out of place in its immaculate crimson robes and gold headpiece as it was possible to be. Azula blinked once, hard, as if against her persistent headache and not a pain far more elusive. And it was gone.

Gods damn it. She had to be better than this. She didn't talk to it. Wasn't that her rule? How could she expect to rule anyone when she couldn't even rule herself…

Azula drew a deep breath. One thing at a time. One foot in front of the other. She had a mission. Everything else was immaterial. This was her one chance. No room for mistakes. No room for distractions. She _had_ to focus. She had to get better.

She would not be as effective as she could be, until she was whole again.

The rising sun had painted a faint line along the eastern horizon, as red and angry as a fresh scar, by the time Azula reached the abandoned mill. She edged around the rotting water wheel that all but blocked the stream depleted by drought, and set the moss-hung wreck aflame once she'd cleared it, then fired the whitewashed house with its roof shaped like a bell curve and shutters painted a flaking green.

Azula trudged up the shallow bank to the lean-to that opened on the water, and the little rowboat she had found inside. She tugged this through the accumulated muck of what had to be months of neglect, at the least, and out into the stream. The decrepit shack collapsed in flames when she punched a fireball at it, almost as an afterthought.

She swung her pack into the boat and jumped in after it, then used one of the oars to push off into the current. This accomplished, she sat tailor style in the bottom on the boat and laid the oar down beside her, to look back over her shoulder and into the warm light of her flames. The burning millwheel had fallen on its side, and fire blazed as merrily inside the broken windows of the old mill as out now, spewing a thick gray column of smoke into the dawn sky that would be visible for miles around.

Azula smirked, and it felt decidedly right. They would come. They would find what she wanted them to, or nothing at all. And she would be well away by then.

_Let the chase begin_.

* * *

Aang was already packed, but Appa still had his morning hay to munch on, so the airbender brushed up on his earthbending forms with Toph on the other side of the courtyard. Today's objective seemed to be rolling waves of earth, like the one Toph rode back to Ba Sing Se after she was kidnapped. She surfed circles around him now, naturally, and Aang didn't seem to like riding the ground as well as he did his airscooter, but he kept at it.

'Cause it wasn't like they could help Sokka prep the war balloon, or anything. The Tribesman scowled, and shoveled more coal into the furnace before the balloon could deflate on top of him. Again.

They would split up to cover more ground, with Aang and Katara on Appa. Toph and his wife would ride in the war balloon with him, the former having decided — loudly, and in full hearing of the group — that Sokka and Suki would be the less annoying couple to share an enclosed space with. This was going to be a long ride, Sokka just knew it.

At least the cloth of their war balloon had been dyed a neutral black, to avoid any unfortunate diplomatic incidents in the Earth Kingdom. And Zuko had provided with them enough food and traveling money to keep them for several weeks, Sokka estimated. He dearly hoped this didn't take that long. Though it began to look like they'd never get started anyway, with how long the ladies were taking to show.

"Our things all packed?" Suki asked briskly, stepping out from the shade of the peristyle just ahead of Katara. The sunlight glinted off her gold headdress, and she walked with the aura of command she always adopted when dressed in her ceremonial armor.

"No thanks to you," Sokka pointed out, throwing an arm around her padded waist with a mischievous grin, when she stepped into the wooden basket beside him. "You know, you're lucky I _like_ that make-up, or I might have to complain about how long you spend putting it on."

"That would be a change," she teased, and pecked him on the cheek before she pushed away.

"Did Zuko clear us to head out?" he asked, wiping the print of her lipstick away. His sister stopped beside the basket, and crossed her arms to lean against the edge, a dark look on her face.

"No, but we could probably just leave," Suki replied, that adorable little line forming between her eyebrows when she regarded Sokka skeptically. "I doubt he wants to see you, after how insensitive you were yesterday."

"I was **not! **He was just being _over_sensitive!" Sokka objected, struck keenly by the unfairness of getting blamed for yesterday. Just because Zuko cried didn't make it his fault! If they _both_ cried, then whose fault would it be? He'd been married long enough to know **not** to ask questions like these anymore, but come on!

"How was _I_ supposed to know he'd be such a **basket case?**" Sokka complained.

But Suki just crossed her arms, unimpressed. "Were we there for the same conversation? Did you just completely **miss** the part where _his wife left him?_"

"I can't _believe_ her!" Katara hissed, and Sokka was mostly just grateful her ire was directed somewhere other than at him. "Just walking out when Zuko needs her most!"

"You shouldn't judge her so rashly," Suki said uncomfortably. Mai had always been something of an outsider among their group. "You don't know the circumstances —"

"Well how am I supposed to help when she won't **tell **me anything?" His sister pushed away from the rim of the basket in frustration, and Suki let her arms drop in growing horror.

"Oh gods, Katara, you _didn't_."

"What's _wrong_ with you?" Zuko shouted from halfway across the courtyard, before Katara could make her reply. And Suki cringed when the Fire Lord made for them in such a towering temper that Sokka wouldn't have been surprised to see a literal storm cloud form over his head. "I never asked you to talk to **Mai!**"

Katara planted hands on her hips and lifted her chin to meet his accusation. "I was trying to help," she said evenly.

Sokka noticed belately that Zuko was clutching a small scroll, when this began to smoke in his hand at Katara's reply. "Yeah, and now thanks to _you_ she probably thinks I'm too much of a coward to speak to her **myself!**" he snapped, crushing the scroll to ashes in his grip.

His sister didn't bat an eye when she retorted, "Well, it kind of looks that way from where I'm standing."

Suki's eyebrows shot skyward, and she looked to Sokka in clear disbelief that this much tactlessness could be contained in one family. He couldn't help but flash a grin at that, despite the situation. About time Miss Levelheaded Perfect realized what a freak show she married into.

"I was giving her time to _cool off!_" Zuko was shouting, clearly indicating his need for such. "My uncle suggested it!" He spread his hands as if that settled the matter.

"Since when does she need to cool off? She shows all the emotion of an ice cube," Katara argued, crossing her arms. "And what reason is that to just take your son and leave?"

"She had _every_ reason!" Zuko hotly defended, and implicated himself by saying so. "I brought you here to find my **sister**, not play _marriage councilor!_ So why don't you just **stay out** of problems that don't _concern_ you?"

Oh crap.

Sokka wondered if Zuko had any idea how many triggers he just tripped there, when his sister dropped what had been an only mildly confrontational stance and put her Kill Face on. Katara never killed anybody, so far as he knew. And she probably never would. But when she brought the Kill Face, you knew.

She could.

It was all there. _Inverted eyebrows_. "I'm sorry, **WHAT?**" _Spots of color on her cheeks_. "You **brought** us here?" _Flared nostrils_. "It doesn't **concern** me?" _Clenched teeth_ —

Aang stopped walking over at the sound of raised voices, and ran. He reached them just in time to grab Katara's shoulder and stop her from thrusting a pointer finger to the chest of a firebender who still looked way angrier and a lot less apprehensive than he should have done. "Katara, he didn't mean —"

"Forget it, Aang!" Katara snapped at the unfortunate airbender, and then seemed to remember who she was actually mad at. "We're _leaving!_" she hurled at Zuko like it was the gravest of insults, and stomped off toward Appa nearby. The sky bison only blinked mildly at her approach, while Momo cowered in the howdah with ears flattened to his head.

"Wouldn't want to keep the _Fire Lord_ waiting!" she threw bitterly over her shoulder, when she climbed atop Appa's head to whip the reins and urge him to his feet. "Wouldn't want to forget our **place!**"

Aang just shook his head at Zuko, whether in silent apology or reproach, Sokka couldn't tell. His heart went out to the monk though, when Aang went to join his seething sister in a hasty departure. It looked like they'd both have a long ride ahead of them now.

Zuko turned away to loose a fireball at the packed gravel of the courtyard with a snarl of frustration when they lifted off. He stormed past Sokka and Suki in their borrowed war balloon, going back the way he came. When he paused beside them, Sokka braced himself for more harsh words, but Zuko only bit out, "Good luck." And walked back into his palace without so much as a glance their way.

"Well, that was awkward," Sokka said slowly to his wife, who nodded fervently in agreement. And Toph chose that moment to burst out of the ground in a spray of gravel. She brought her foot down while Sokka and Suki dusted debris from their clothes, the equivalent of looking around for her.

"Twinkletoes skipped out on training _again?_" Toph demanded, and gestured to the hay-strewn patch of courtyard Appa had occupied only moments ago. "What a flake!"

"Yeah, let's go with that," Sokka said flatly, looking back the way Zuko had gone. He'd take Flaky Aang over Angry Jerk any day. He guessed they'd all be happier once Azula was back in her straitjacket. But first he had to make it happen.

Right. No problem.


	12. The Seal

**Well, only about a month since my last update, so not so bad. Still expected to get this to you several days ago, but between a bad sprain, babysitting little kiddies, and the headache that is TWO fight scenes this chapter, this ended up taking longer than expected.**

**Don't get me wrong. I like fight scenes. They're fun to imagine and hopefully fun for you to read, not to mention well-nigh unavoidable when writing Azula. The problem is, I'm not a fighter, of any stripe. So I end up having to do a lot of research, in the form of combing through screenshots and old episodes of ATLA for the bending, and looking up things like pressure points of the human body on the internet. All this to figure out things like ... Is this physically possible? (You'd think a degree in physics would help there, but no. Not enough.) Is this physically _practical? _(Which often entails trying out moves myself in front of a mirror, which ... really, it's probably a good thing I live alone, or I'd freak people the hell out.) And then, of course, how do I describe this?**

**So basically, I am curious for feedback on the fight scenes ... though that's that probably not what I'm going to get feedback on, considering the bombshell this chapter. Feedback on it all, please! You know I always like to hear from you.**

**The Kyoshi Warriors were an especial challenge, because of the variety of weapons and techniques they use. And while obviously they're not in the same league as Azula combat-wise, I didn't want to make them complete wusses by comparison, or just have Azula blast them to ashes, because really ... how could I call that a fight scene? I could not.**

**To address some reviewers: "And re: the previous chapter, you don't think her face-off with Mai in Boiling Rock Part 2 counted as wanting to kill somebody? It certainly seemed like a in the heat of the moment thing." I hadn't considered that, though I guess you could argue whether Azula actually intended to kill or just to hurt/attack Mai. Azula doesn't consider it in making the comparison mostly because she's considering the extent to which she's okay with the _concept _of killing someone, which requires premeditation.**

**"how Iroh discovered what Ozai had done to Azula ... But I still don't see how Azula could mistook Iroh for Ozai": All I can say for now, without spoiling unduly, is that we will see more of the contents of Iroh's visits to Azula as we see more of Iroh's POV.**

**"how [Iroh] justifies that he will not face Ozai, it wouldn't be right for a brother to take the throne from his brother ... But after he says that he sends of Zuko to take down Azula, so it's right for a brother to take the throne from his sister?" You make a good point, but I think the contradiction comes from different contexts on the part of Iroh and Zuko. I think Iroh was saying that POLITICALLY, it wouldn't be a smart move for him to take down Ozai, because he would be seen as usurping his brother who already ruled for 6-7 years. Whereas Zuko could defeat Azula without fear of political repercussions (so he thinks) because she was still uncrowned (and yeah, it probably didn't hurt that she was a woman, and younger to boot). But I think Zuko, being Zuko, took this at face value as some kind of MORAL judgment on the rightness of his cause (which Iroh may well have intended), hence the confusion.**

**You make many insightful points beyond that, JLBB, but a lot of them I can't answer right now without spoilers, except to tell you ... we'll get there!**

**And on that note, welcome to my new reviewers, and thanks so much to those of you returning! (Thanks also to Meneldur, for feedback on the chapter-opening flashback, and just informed and entertaining discussion generally.) I'm morbidly curious to see how many of you will hate me by chapter's end ... or I guess, about halfway through the chapter. Hopefully none of you, but still stepping into my flame-retardant jumpsuit, just to be safe. And to preempt any accusations of Deus Angst Machina, I should tell you that at least two future plot points (and one potential in the planned sequel) will depend on this one. Small comfort to Azula probably, but there you have it.**

**Anyway, I should probably stop spoiling and let you get on with reading. WARNING: Chapter exceeds 17K words, but is broken up into sections, if you need clearly marked stopping points. I thought of breaking it up into two chapters, but I wanted to end with Azula's reaction, and kind of bookend with the flashback at the beginning of the chapter. Just like with chapter 7, some knowledge of Azula's past is required to understand why she reacts the way she does to present developments...**

**Well, this author's note has gotten way too long, so happy reading! (And please review!)**

* * *

_The rhythmic _buzz_ of cricket wasps filled her ears, and blood rushed to her head to tingle pleasantly along her scalp, the longer a twelve year old Ty Lee hung upside down from a tree outside Azula's window. She swung idly back and forth on the sturdy limb for what felt like a long time but was probably only a few minutes, watching the princess through the window screens._

_She sat perfectly still in a hard-backed chair beside the window, wrapped up in one of Princess Ursa's old wool sleeping robes. Her youth and small stature made it a poor fit, and the heavy cloth almost seemed to swallow her in the late summer heat. Her eyes fixed straight ahead on nothing Ty Lee could see, and she had barely blinked in all the time the acrobat watched her._

Not training_, Ty Lee noted to herself, frowning_. _Not at lessons, or meditating, or any of the other stuff Li and Lo said every time Ty Lee had tried to call on her in the past two weeks. When she asked again an hour ago, they said Azula was sleeping. The crown princess of the Fire Nation and youngest firebending master for probably hundreds and hundreds of years, sleeping in the middle of the afternoon. They must think Ty Lee was stupid or something._

_Maybe she was, not to get the message sooner. What was it Mai said that one time, before Azula's dad promoted her dad, and she moved to the colonies? Ty Lee stopped swinging, and tried to remember. Something about, they never said anything before — No, that wasn't it. But those old ladies were Azula's servants, right? So if they were lying to her, it was like _Azula _was lying to her…_

_Lying 'cause she didn't want Ty Lee around._

_She swung quickly upright on the branch with her back to the window screens, and angrily blinked away the beginnings of tears. It wasn't true, she told herself. The other girls at the academy said Azula was a liar, even Mai did, but Ty Lee knew she didn't lie about that. When Ty Lee was being annoying or childish or empty-headed, Azula told her so, she didn't just invent excuses not to be around her._

_Mai said it was because Azula didn't care what she thought. That was the only reason she was honest with Ty Lee. But Azula didn't care what anyone thought except her dad, and she still lied to all of _them…

_Mai was gone now, anyway. And Ty Lee might never see Azula again. She shouldn't say goodbye to her friend while she was thinking all these unkind thoughts that probably — definitely — weren't even true. They _weren't_._

_Ty Lee climbed to her feet on the tree branch instead, pivoted to face the window, and shimmied down the length of it until she got to a part that was thin enough to get her hands around, but still sturdy enough to support her weight. She flashed a reckless grin and stepped backward off the branch, grabbing it on her way down to swing up and over and using the momentum to launch herself across the gap, in a flurry of dislodged leaves._

_She collided with the window screen practically right next to where Azula was sitting, and felt kinda bad when the princess turned her chair over and tripped on the hem of her too-long robe in her haste to stand. Azula didn't even know she was out here, Ty Lee realized. But she was practically impossible to sneak up on —_

_"Ty Lee, what are you _doing_ here?" Azula demanded in a choked whisper, her eyes wide with an unaccustomed fear and her fingers gripping the window screen from the inside much like Ty Lee did from the outside, to steady herself. Her other hand held the heavy robe closed, though she looked to be fully clothed beneath it._

_"I needed to see you!" she pleaded, and Azula breathed a quiet sigh, moving to an adjacent panel in the window screen to unlatch it and admit Ty Lee._

_"And what?" the princess asked her when she climbed inside. "You couldn't use a _door_ like a normal person?"_

_Ty Lee stopped. Azula must not know Li and Lo turned her away, or she wouldn't ask that. Unless she was lying, but … Azula didn't look like she was lying. Ty Lee looked closer. _

_Azula didn't look like she was _well_._

_Ty Lee had seen the deep red of her aura shot through with a poisonous lemon-yellow when she lied sometimes, and a clear, bright gold when she bent fire. A sunny orange when she was spinning plans or made one of those jokes that Ty Lee didn't get until later. Even forest green when she used to watch her mom with Zuko. Ty Lee always thought the green was ugly against the rich crimson of her aura, but now even the red was gone, replaced by a muddy blue. And closer in, a gray so dark it was almost black._

_There were other things. Her shadowed eyes were fever-bright, and only stood out more starkly for being lined with kohl. Perspiration shone on her pale skin, like after she pushed herself too hard training. But she started shivering even while Ty Lee watched, so it must be a cold sweat. Her dark hair hung free of its usual topknot, tucked inside the collar of her robe. Ty Lee couldn't remember the last time she saw Azula with her hair down…_

_She didn't realize she was staring, until Azula waved a hand in front of her face. "Ty Lee?" she prompted wearily. "I asked you a question. Why are you sneaking around? What's wrong?"_

_"My parents are having me followed!" Ty Lee explained, worrying the end of her braid. And that was true enough; she had to run across several blocks worth of rooftops to shake the pursuit of her own family servants. Azula didn't need to know what she thought about her lying earlier. It would just hurt her feelings. "I had to be stealthy."_

_"Followed?" The princess frowned. "Why?"_

_"I'm s'posed to marry some guy!" Ty Lee burst out, dropping her braid in distress. "Some guy I don't even _know!_"_

_Azula blinked. "Your parents betrothed you?" she asked slowly. She seemed to be having some trouble following Ty Lee, which was weird, because usually it was the other way around. "But you're only twelve. All your sisters…" she trailed off, which was even weirder, because she hated that and got mad at Ty Lee when she did it._

_Azula took a heavy step back and bent to set the black wood chair she was sitting in upright. "Why would they only make _you_ marry?" she said hollowly. She kept holding on to the back of the chair, her fingers gripping the gold inlay. "That doesn't make sense."_

_Ty Lee hesitated at that. If she told her the whole story, Azula might try to stop her. She always agreed with her dad. "I think they're afraid I'm going to run away and join the circus," she offered, spreading her hands helplessly._

_Azula seemed to notice her change of attire for the first time, the slit pink skirt and harem pants, the simple flats and wristbands she wore. Besides the triangular collar and maybe the bare midriff, nothing about her new outfit said Fire Nation, and why should it? She bought these clothes from traveling merchants, and dyed them her signature pink with her own hands. She wanted to look like she belonged in a circus._

_Ty Lee knew she succeeded, when all Azula said was, "Are you?"_

_And oh, this would have been so much easier if Azula had just made a crack about her peasant clothes, or laughed it off for a stupid idea, or any of a dozen other reactions Ty Lee had imagined when she tried to plan their parting. But she wasn't as good at planning as Azula. _

_"If I don't go _now_, I may never get to," Ty Lee tried gently, taking a step closer to Azula. But she didn't need to watch her aura to see the hurt and anger that gathered on her face with every word Ty Lee spoke, and even still, she couldn't seem to stop talking. "You know I've always wanted —"_

_"You can't," Azula whispered harshly. Her dark brows forked sharply in anger, softened by the tears that shone in her eyes. "You _can't. _You —"_

_But a whole other kind of pain gripped her then. Ty Lee just glimpsed what looked unbelievably like panic on her wan face, before Azula bolted to the low slung dresser set against the paneled wall behind them. She dropped to her knees to vomit into an ornate red vase on the floor beside it, grasping the gilt handles in white-knuckled hands. But even surprised, Ty Lee was right behind her, and managed to hold her hair back out of the way before she got any puke in it._

_It was over as soon as it started, with nothing but the faint smell of sick and a kneeling princess of the Fire Nation to indicate what had just happened. _What just happened?_ Ty Lee wondered, still holding Azula's hair when she shuddered._

_"Gods _damn_ it!" Azula startled Ty Lee, who had never heard her curse before. "You'd think it'd __**stop**__ after —" She stopped then, like she only just remembered something._

_"Why don't you just tie your hair up?" Ty Lee blurted the first thing that came to her mind, and Azula wasn't even annoyed when she asked such an obvious question._

_She bent her head lower over the vase, like she was too tired to hold it up anymore. "I have a headache," she said dully. "It gets worse when —"_

_She didn't finish her thought again, and now Ty Lee was really worried. "'Zula, what's wrong?"_

_"I'm sick," she said shortly, climbing to her feet and pulling her hair from Ty Lee's grip, to tuck it back inside the collar of her mother's robe. She brushed away the tracks of tears on her face with an impatient swipe of her fingers._

_The acrobat blinked at her terse reply. "Well yeah, but … with what?"_

_"It doesn't matter." She turned over a gilded hourglass set atop the dresser, so a thin stream of sand fell from one glass bulb to another, and held a tea strainer over her cup. A pulpy mash of what might have been crushed leaves, shredded stems, and petals lavender and yellow accumulated on the sunburst strainer when she poured from a golden pot embossed with the sinuous figure of a dragon and dancing flames. She set these both aside with the ease of practice, to hold the delicate cup in both hands. And steam began to rise from the tea when she heated it. _

_"Just a miscalculation," Azula said almost to herself, and Ty Lee heard how she paused over the word, like it wasn't her own. "I'm taking care of it."_

_Ty Lee sniffed carefully, and made a face. "With mint tea?" she asked, bewildered. It smelled a little off, but Zuko hadn't been much good at brewing tea, that time Ty Lee crashed his picnic with Princess Ursa. Maybe Azula wasn't either._

_"It's not —" she started, then just shook her head. "Doctor Lao says this can relieve cramping," Azula spoke as if reciting from memory, and dumped a heaping spoonful of some off-white powder into the cup and stirred, her movements mechanical, "and settle an upset stomach."_

_Ty Lee eyed the vase Azula threw up in. "Um, I don't think it's working," she noted a little nervously._

_But the princess was unperturbed. "It just needs time," she contradicted darkly, raising the cup to her painted lips to take a long draught. She pulled a face, and added, "Though I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever get this taste out of my mouth." She sighed fit to rival Mai, and downed the rest of the cup, setting it back on the dresser. _

_"I've been taking it every few hours, by Fa— by our physician's orders. I shouldn't have to for much longer," she tried to reassure Ty Lee. But her worry must have still shown on her face, because Azula said firmly, "It's fine, Ty Lee. I'll be fine."_

_It was kinda hard to believe her with the dark circles under her eyes and the sweat that still shone on her skin in the afternoon sun, but Ty Lee knew she would say no more on the subject. The princess picked up the train of her winter robe to avoid tripping on it, and crossed to the chair she was sitting in before. She resumed her seat and leaned forward with elbows propped on her knees and one hand braced against her forehead, her eyes squeezed closed against what Ty Lee guessed was her headache._

_Ty Lee wondered if Azula could heat her hand to make it a hot compress, like the warm washcloth her Nana would drape on her forehead when she was sick. That always felt so good. Ty Lee was about to suggest this when Azula spoke again, without even opening her eyes._

_"Listen, you don't have to run away." She drew a deep breath, as if bracing herself for an unpleasant undertaking. "I'll talk to my father. He might get your parents to back off."_

_Ty Lee shifted nervously where she stood. Now she'd __**have**__ to come out and say it. "But he suggested the match," she admitted dismally._

_Azula let her hand drop and looked up at Ty Lee, the question written clearly on her face. "He wanted to elevate my family, to say thanks for being your friend," Ty Lee related the circumstances her own father had told her. "We're only minor nobles, and he arranged a match with some nobleman's son on Shu Jing. They're a cadet branch of your family, from back before Fire Lord Sozin. My dad already had to turn down the post as an ambassador, 'cause Mom's too sick to travel and —"_

_Ty Lee stopped talking when she remembered she forgot to tell Azula about that. She didn't start talking again when she saw the look on Azula's face. It was like someone walled off the last window into her prison cell… Ty Lee couldn't guess where that came from, when the princess was the most powerful person she knew. But it fit. Somehow, it fit._

_"Then you have to go," Azula whispered, her gaze fixed straight ahead again._

_The acrobat blinked helplessly, unnerved by her abrupt change of mind. "But you said —"_

_"If it wasn't this, it would be something else. Something worse," Azula kept speaking as if she hadn't even heard her. But she looked hard at Ty Lee when she repeated, "You __**have**__ to go."_

_"But Azula, I don't —"_

_"What, _now_ you want to stay?" she demanded, surging to her feet only to take a swift step back and grip the back of the chair so hard she almost upset it. "Now that — I don't __**want**__ you here?"_

_"Azula…" she said softly, her eyes widening with hurt. Why would she say that? Even Ty Lee could tell she didn't mean it._

_"As if you haven't been waiting for any __**excuse**__ since _Mai_ left." Azula walked stiffly past her up the shallow steps to the foot of her bed. She grabbed one of the slender marble pillars that supported the canopy and leaned against it, her head bent and her expression hidden from Ty Lee._

_"That's not true," she put forth quietly, but Azula still tensed at the contradiction._

_"_Isn't it?_" Azula let go of her bedpost and turned on the stair to glare down at Ty Lee. "Do you think I don't know we were only introduced because your __**parents**__ were trying to betroth you to _Zuko?_" she spat, her fingers clenching like they always did at the mention of her banished brother. "For all the good it would have done you."_

_This was the first Ty Lee heard of it, but she guessed it might be true. It was beside the point anyway. "That's my parents, Azula. Not me," she insisted, approaching the white-faced princess. "You're my friend, and I care about _you_. I'm here because I want to be here."_

_"Except when you __**don't**__ anymore," she said tightly, and all the fight seemed to go out of her. She sat down hard on the edge of her bed, and bent to grip her middle like someone punched her in the gut. Tears struggled at the corners of her eyes, her mouth drew taut with pain._

_This was exactly what Ty Lee feared. "That's not fair," she argued, a little desperately. "Don't you remember how you felt when your granddad tried to arrange a marriage for you? I mean, I know you were younger, but … you wouldn't want that for me, would you?" She climbed the shallow steps to sit beside Azula, as close as she dared._

_"What I want doesn't matter," the princess spoke with an awful finality. "It never did."_

_"It matters to me," Ty Lee said gently, and reached out to lay a hand on her arm in reassurance._

_But she bolted down the steps to turn on Ty Lee, her eyes wide and furious. "The only thing that ever mattered to _you_ was gaining __**attention**__, you grasping little _leech!_" Azula said poisonously. "But I guess that wasn't worth putting up with __**me**__ anymore," she gestured sharply to herself, "_was it?_"_

_And Ty Lee felt like that time she fell through thin ice, when her family wintered in the colonies. Azula's words were like the water underneath, a hundred tiny knives stabbing at her, and tears welled in her eyes._

_"Just like everyone, you _wanted_ something. Just like everyone, when you find some way else to get it, you're __**gone!**__" Azula accused her, while tears drew steaming tracks down her heart-shaped face. "You act like you're doing me some kind of __**favor**__, saying goodbye when my _mother_ didn't," she sneered, her mouth twisting as if the word were a curse. "Well, you're no better than her!"_

_Azula was stopped in her halting retreat when she bumped into the corner of the low slung dresser, and turned to catch herself against it, her fingers gripping the edge. She didn't look at Ty Lee when she spoke._

_"You act like you're my _friend_, when the only one __**stupid**__ enough to believe that is _you_."_

_Ty Lee clapped a hand over her mouth, but not in time to stop a heartbroken sound that fell somewhere between a squeak and a sob at her angry disavowal. Her sight blurred with tears, and the first time she blinked them away, the princess had taken one step closer to where she still sat at the end of the bed, something like regret written on her bloodless face._

_The next time she blinked, Azula was on her knees on the gray tile floor, one hand braced against it while the other darted inside the folds of her robe to grip her stomach. Ty Lee was on her feet and down the shallow steps in an instant, her own hurt all but forgotten. _

_"Azula, just tell me," she coaxed a little desperately, dropping to her knees beside the princess. "What's wrong with you?"_

_"I said, it's __**nothing**__," she grit out, her hair falling in front of her face._

_Her eyes widened. If she couldn't even think up a believable lie… "Azula —"_

_"_Leave it alone!_" she screamed, her voice breaking when she bent and gripped her head, as if to shield herself from a blow. There was blood on her fingers._

_A knock sounded at the door._

_"_What?_" Azula snapped, dropping her hands before Ty Lee could say anything else._

_"A message from the Fire Lord." The serving girl's voice was barely audible behind thick steel._

_Azula shuddered visibly, but managed to climb to her feet with some unsolicited help from Ty Lee, who backed off at a scowl from her. "Come in," the princess said shortly._

_A crimson-smocked servant not much older than either of them entered and prostrated herself before Azula. "Princess, Fire Lord Ozai orders your presence at the Burning Throne," she recited dutifully._

_"_What?_" Ty Lee demanded. "She can't go now, she's __**sick!**__" She gestured to the princess in illustration, even though her servant didn't look up._

_But Azula shot Ty Lee a swift glare, so vehement it silenced her. "If my father commands," she slowly replied, "of course, I will appear." The servant touched her forehead to the floor to indicate her understanding. "Only give me a moment to take leave of my guest."_

_"Yes, Princess," the girl replied softly, rising to back out with her eyes fixed on the floor. "I will wait for you outside."_

_Ty Lee turned expectantly to Azula, but the princess only walked past her to the foldable paper screen that divided her changing area from the rest of her room. She paused beside the screen and turned her head as if to look over her shoulder. She stopped before her eyes met Ty Lee's._

_"Get out," she said flatly, her tone tightly controlled. "Just leave. Just like everyone always does."_

_And she disappeared behind the screen, but Ty Lee didn't leave, clasping her hands miserably where she stood. This didn't go at all like she wanted. She didn't even get to hug Azula goodbye! And what she said about — about not being her friend… Azula didn't mean that, right? If Ty Lee just gave her time, she'd take it back, she'd apologize like she always did before._

_Except they didn't have time, 'cause she was running away. She might never see Azula again… _

_She finally stopped her fidgeting when a snarl of frustration reached her from behind the screen. And swallowing her trepidation, Ty Lee approached to peek behind it._

_Azula sat on a bench before a full-length gilt mirror, clad in her black ceremonial armor, edged with gold. Her mother's heavy robe and the dress and gray pants she wore beneath it lay discarded with what looked like half her wardrobe in a pile in the corner. _

_She had pulled her dark hair into a knot at the back of her head, and caught her finger when she tried to tie it with a ribbon. Breathing hard, she yanked her hand free only for the topknot to tumble undone down her back. Her shoulders slumped hopelessly, and she bit her lip so hard she drew blood._

_It was at that moment she caught sight of Ty Lee's reflection in the mirror. Azula didn't look surprised to still see her there. She didn't say anything when the acrobat approached._

_Ty Lee retrieved the dropped ribbon and the brush from where it sat beside Azula on the bench, and stepped behind her. She pulled long, swift strokes of the brush through Azula's hair, gathering it at the back of her head and twisting and folding it into a topknot. _

_She tied this with the ribbon and still Azula didn't speak, just watched their reflection in the mirror through heavy-lidded eyes. She looked like she might fall asleep sitting right there, but soon proved the folly of thinking so, when Ty Lee grabbed her three-point flame headpiece from the bench and stuck it in her topknot. _

_"Azula…" Ty Lee tried, but her hand flashed up to grasp Ty Lee's wrist and ease her hand away. The blood was gone from her fingers, and Ty Lee started to wonder if she'd only imagined it. _

_Azula stood and walked stiffly to her gold-edged, black wood desk to open the center drawer, then surprised Ty Lee by pulling the entire drawer and its assorted contents out of the desk. She knelt awkwardly to lay this down on the rug beside her, and then stuck her whole arm inside the empty compartment to withdraw a small object wrapped in red silk, from what must have been some secret cubbyhole. _

_She held this out wordlessly to Ty Lee, and replaced the desk drawer when the acrobat took it from her hand. Azula managed to climb to her feet with the desk to lean on, and drew deep breaths as if focusing herself, while Ty Lee unwrapped the folds of silk._

_She found a cylinder of ivory inside, small enough to fit easily into the palm of her hand and carved into the shape of a dragon. Its jaws closed around a blunt-edged square, and Ty Lee turned it over to read the rectangular characters embossed on the bottom and stained with red paste… _

_She drew a sharp breath when she recognized the forms. _Seal script._ "This is … your _royal seal_," she whispered reverently, looking up at Azula in question._

_The princess crossed her arms to lean one hip against the desk. Azula cast a surreptitious glance at the door left ajar behind her, before she quietly replied, "If anyone asks, you stole it."_

_Her eyes bugged. "But I didn't —"_

_Azula sighed. "If anyone asks _me_, Ty Lee," she clarified impatiently, "I'll have to say you stole it. If anyone asks _you_, you're on business from the crown princess. And if they have a problem giving you anything you need, food, transport, lodging for the night … tell them they can take it up with me." She shifted to put her weight on both feet, grimacing. A drop of perspiration fell from her chin, when she raised her head to say, "Trust me, __**no one **__will take it up with me."_

_A grin tugged irresistibly at the corners of her mouth, and Ty Lee clutched the seal to her and shifted from foot to foot with the effort of containing her gratitude. Azula looked a little oddly at her, but kept speaking, "This will get you out of the Fire Nation. Run as fast and as far as you can —"_

_Ty Lee couldn't help it anymore. "You're the _best_ friend __**EVER!**__"__she burst out, and made to tackle the princess in a hug —_

_"_Stop it!_" Azula snapped, visibly alarmed. Her leather bracers crossed over her chest to rebuff Ty Lee, and her shoulders hunched as if protecting herself from a body blow and not a hug. "We're not little kids anymore."_

_Ty Lee withdrew crestfallen, the dragon seal still clutched in hand. "Sorry," she whispered tearfully, and Azula dropped her stance. She wouldn't cry, she wouldn't cry…_

_Azula let out a long breath in exasperation. "And listen, just — don't get yourself killed," she said harshly. "I might have need of you again one day." Ty Lee nodded soberly, and Azula added, "You should leave the way you came."_

_With no more farewell than that, Azula exited the room and didn't look back. She walked slowly and couldn't seem to stand quite straight, and almost staggered the last few feet to the door. She paused on the threshold, and Ty Lee thought she might say something else, but she didn't. She just left to answer her dad's summons, and pulled the door closed behind her._

_Ty Lee should leave, too. Azula made that clear. But it wouldn't hurt to wait 'til she came back, would it? Maybe Ty Lee could get a proper hug when the princess wasn't in a hurry anymore, she considered, dropping the royal seal in her pocket to walk on her hands back to the center of the room. And sometimes when Azula's dad sent for her, she came back upset. She might want to talk about it…_

_She wouldn't want to talk about it, Ty Lee admitted, somersaulting back to her feet. But she might want someone to talk at _her_, about stupid meaningless stuff to distract her. Azula acted annoyed when she did that, but sometimes Ty Lee thought she secretly liked it._

_And Ty Lee didn't like to run away while she was sick. Maybe she could wait just a few days, until Azula felt better. Now that she had the seal, she could leave any time she wanted, probably…_

_Shadows lengthened on the gray stone floor. Ty Lee stopped practicing her acrobatics when the sun went down, and Azula still didn't come back. She went to sit in a corner near the shallow steps up to Azula's bed and played with the end of her braid and tried to ignore how scary Azula's bedroom looked in the dark._

_She'd never had to be in here alone before. She always had Azula or Mai with her, the few times Azula let them spend the night. But that was a long time ago, before Zuko was banished even._

_Azula's bedroom was so big that the ceiling was lost in darkness, and the moonlight that filtered through the window screens didn't even reach the other side of the room. The worst part for Ty Lee was the canopies. There were two, one shaped like a pyramid and supported by the black marble pillars arranged around Azula's bed, carved with flames on top and a golden dragon that draped his head over the front edge. That one wasn't so bad. But the other jutted out from the wall behind her bed, with no ornamentation besides big toothlike studs at the corners. It might have hung from the ceiling too, but like the ceiling, it was lost in darkness, so Ty Lee couldn't tell._

_Every time she looked up into that dark immensity, Ty Lee thought it looked like a giant mouth. Like Azula slept in a dragon's maw. Her hand closed over the royal seal in her pocket, warmed by the heat of her body, and Ty Lee felt a little less scared. But not much._

_What was taking Azula so long?_

_Despite her dread, Ty Lee must have dozed off at some point, because when she looked up sharply at the bang of the door thrown open, no moonlight shone through the window screens anymore, and the room was blanketed in darkness. A towering figure stood in the door, silhouetted by the lamplight from the hall behind, blocking most of this in its breadth. It wasn't Azula. _

_It was her dad._

_Fire Lord Ozai stormed into the room, breathing so hard Ty Lee could hear him from where she crouched in the corner. She could only make out half his face in the light from the hall, but what she could see was the picture of impotent fury. And even if she couldn't see this, she would know it when he grabbed the delicate paper screen Azula changed behind and tore it joint from a joint with a wordless howl of rage. He set the wreck aflame with his own hands, and threw it away from him with such violence that it broke all over again on hitting the gray tile floor._

_A flaming piece bounced close to Ty Lee, and she could not help a peep of alarm when she flinched from it._

_Azula's dad stopped where he stood, and lit a fire in his palm that banished the shadows to insignificance, and threw every article of furniture around Ty Lee and the acrobat herself into sharp relief. The sudden light didn't make her feel any better. It didn't make her feel better at all. Because he saw her. And Ty Lee knew a moment of blinding terror, when she imagined his big hands doing to her what they did to the screen…_

_But he seemed to collect himself a little, upon realizing he was not alone in the room. "Who gave you leave to skulk about?" he spoke thickly, his voice choked with rage. He walked so close to the burning screen that the train of his Fire Lord robes should have caught on fire. But it didn't._

_She considered saying Azula, but that wasn't true, and Ty Lee didn't want to get her in trouble with her dad. "N-no one," she managed, squeezing as far back into the corner as she could fit when he approached her._

_His chin had the same point to it as Azula's, or would if he didn't wear a beard. And his eyes were the same shape and color as his son's, but with none of Zuko's warmth. Those eyes narrowed dangerously at her reply, and he demanded, "Then what are you still _doing_ here?"_

_"I was w-waiting for Azula to come back," Ty Lee almost pleaded, though what she was pleading for, she didn't quite know. "Where is she?"_

_The flame died in his hand, and the Fire Lord stopped at her question, so close that his shadow engulfed her. "She is training," he said, so quietly she almost didn't hear him when he stood right over her._

_It took every ounce of courage Ty Lee had to point out, "B-but … it's the middle of the night."_

_His hand flashed out quick as a two-headed rat viper, and Ty Lee cried out in fear that he would hit her. But the Fire Lord seized her arm instead, yanking her roughly to her feet. "She trains when I _say_ she trains," he sternly reproved her, a scowl cutting his brow. _

_"She is a prodigy," he said almost to himself, and something like a shadow fell over his face. "My perfect girl…"_

_Something in his voice made Ty Lee's eyes go wide. He talked about Azula like — like maybe she wasn't those things anymore. Like something bad happened to her…_

_He must have felt her go slack with surprise, because the Fire Lord took that opportunity to pull Ty Lee into the light from the hall. His hand gripped her arm like a vice, so hard Ty Lee started to lose feeling in it. _

_"She will sit the Burning Throne one day, with the world for her dominion," he spoke harshly, without so much as looking at Ty Lee. He pulled her along almost faster than she could walk. "Nothing will divert her from that goal. Nothing," he stopped on the threshold and turned to regard her, "and _no one_. Do you understand?"_

_Ty Lee just stared at him, bewildered. He shook her so hard her teeth rattled in her skull. "_Well?_"_

_Ty Lee nodded frantically, even though she didn't understand. Azula's dad snorted with disdain._

_He hauled her out into the lamplight of the hall, and Ty Lee spotted two servants halfway down the length of it. They scrubbed at a dark stain on the tile floor, working on hands and knees with their heads together, whispering. They fell silent immediately on spotting the Fire Lord, and redoubled their efforts, eyes fixed determinedly on their work and not on the young girl he led by the arm down a side passage._

_Ty Lee lost track of how many turns they took before they finally came across an imperial firebender near the palace kitchens. Her arm hurt so badly by that time that Ty Lee had to bite her lip to keep from crying. She could feel exactly where she would have bruises tomorrow…_

_He finally let her go when they reached the guard, who stood sharply at attention. "Remove this girl from the palace grounds, and bar the gates against her," Fire Lord Ozai said simply._

_"Yes, my Lord," the guard replied, his voice muffled behind the three-eyed helm he wore when he touched gloved fist to palm in the national salute. Azula's dad just turned and stalked away, and somehow, Ty Lee knew he had forgotten about her before he even turned the corner out of sight._

_She looked to the imperial firebender with some trepidation, but he only offered her his arm in silence. And smiling weakly, Ty Lee took it. She shook a little while he led her out, but the guard didn't remark it. There was nothing he could have said to make her feel better anyway._

_When he pushed her gently out the service entrance and locked the gate behind her, the half-moon was just setting behind the rim of the caldera. Sunrise was nowhere in sight, and the white stone streets of the capital were deserted, so far as she could tell. _

_It was almost cold this late at night, and Ty Lee took the warm dragon seal from her pocket and clutched it as tightly as if it were one of her stuffed animals, and not a carved piece of ivory. She turned to look back at the palace, and saw that the guard had gone back inside and no lights shone in the windows behind her. The upthrust tower and sprawling wings of the palace stood as immovable as a mountain against the stars._

_Ty Lee blinked away tears. She didn't want to leave while Azula was sick. She didn't…_

This will get you out of the Fire Nation. Run as fast and as far as you can.

_She bit her lip against Azula's warning. Didn't she owe it to her to make sure she was okay? How else could she prove they were friends, whatever the princess said?_

Azula_ proved it, Ty Lee realized, looking at the royal seal she held. _She proved it when she gave you this…

_Her chin shook with threatened tears when she took one last look at the palace._

You **have** to go.

_"I'm sorry, Azula," Ty Lee whispered._

_And she ran._

* * *

It was only when Azula showed up at her circus a year and a half later to recruit Ty Lee that it finally dawned on her. The seal may have got her out of the Fire Nation, but it also left a trail for Azula to follow.

Ty Lee had written her upwards of a dozen times in the first few months after she ran away, but received no reply. Finally, she gave up writing, but it made her sad to think the princess might not even be able to find her if she needed her again. Of course, Azula thought of that. Azula thought of everything.

Ty Lee was happy to see her then. Azula was her friend. Her first and oldest friend. But it didn't take her long to tell that Azula had changed. There was a coldness to her that Ty Lee had seen sometimes before, but she it saw all the time then.

Her aura alternated between an angry scarlet and a muddy red the color of dried blood. Ty Lee was surprised when they found Zuko in Ba Sing Se and his aura was the same color. That never happened before, for as long as Ty Lee knew them.

Azula didn't seem as outwardly angry as her brother, but it was right there in her aura. Auras didn't lie. Azula did though, all the time then. Ty Lee didn't know what else to make of the lemon-yellow that sometimes drowned out the red and orange in her aura entirely, and then would fade to green and then gray, like a backwards bruise.

Ty Lee guessed it was a small difference from what she saw before, and she was never a student of auras. Where would she learn something like that in the Fire Nation, anyway? But for people she knew well, people whose auras she saw all the time … she thought she knew pretty well what they meant. And Azula's meant something bad.

And as the months passed and then Zuko ran away, Azula just got worse and worse. Until Ty Lee wasn't just scared for her anymore.

She was scared of her.

They made real progress in the asylum though, once Ty Lee was finally allowed to see Azula again. She started to feel like the friend Ty Lee knew before, the same girl who gave her her ticket out of the Fire Nation, who helped her chase her dream…

Ty Lee found the dragon seal packed away with the rest of her things on her last spring cleaning. She brought it with her to return to Azula, on the second to last visit she paid her. But Azula told her to keep it.

"What good it that to anyone now?" she had demanded quietly, looking with hooded eyes on the carved ivory seal Ty Lee held out to her. "I'll never put my name to anything."

It made Ty Lee sad to hear her talk like that, to see her aura such a dingy gray, so much darker than Mai's had been. Azula didn't think she would ever get out of the asylum, Ty Lee knew. Ty Lee wished she could tell her different, but Azula was probably right.

Zuko refused to even consider releasing her. He would see she wasn't crazy anymore if he just talked to her, but Zuko wouldn't even see her. Yeah, Ty Lee knew they had a bad history, but wasn't it a Fire Lord's job to take care of all his subjects, even the ones he didn't like? It made her mad just thinking about it, about him. Why wouldn't he listen? Didn't he care?

Ty Lee finished touching her toes, and bent backwards into a wheel pose, then eased her pelvis forward and pointed her toes, bending her elbows to support her weight with her forearms. She watched the sun rise upside down, over the waves beyond the wooded promontory where her cottage was situated. She sweat lightly despite the early hour, and her choice to forego the bracers, gloves, facepaint, and padding that would complete her Kyoshi Warrior uniform.

This was probably one of the last really hot days they'd have on the island. Winter always seemed to come early here, probably because they were in the middle of the ocean, and not that far from the polar ice cap. By contrast, winters in the Fire Nation weren't that different from summers. It might be a little rainier and get cold at night sometimes, but was otherwise unremarkable.

Ty Lee wondered when she could see Azula again. She thought their last visit went pretty well. She had guessed correctly that Azula might like a makeover, and the princess even let Ty Lee do her nails and teach her to braid her hair. It wasn't until the end that she said not to come back.

Azula said not to come back for her birthday, but she didn't say _when_ to come back. And Ty Lee was left wondering if the answer was, well … never.

No. Azula was her friend. She said as much, and meant it. She wouldn't just _dismiss_ Ty Lee like that. Maybe she would write when she wanted to see her again? Except Azula only ever wrote to Zuko, who never answered her letters… Ty Lee sighed, rocking back to kick herself into a handstand and balance on one hand. She would never understand them. She guessed it was different having a brother though.

And she couldn't leave now anyway. Suki still hadn't come back from her trip to the North Pole with Sokka, some kind of trade meeting right after the anniversary of war's end in the Fire Nation. Ty Lee thought a month was kind of a long time for a trade meeting to last though, and Suki must be getting really bored by now.

But when she voiced this aloud at their last training session at the dojo, the other girls looked uncomfortable, glancing at each other like they had some kind of secret. And willowy Kaede, Suki's replacement until she got back, just said they would have to continue their duties in her absence. It worried Ty Lee. She could tell something was wrong, but no one seemed to want to talk about it.

Ty Lee had just completed a series of midair splits when she heard a knock on her own front door behind her. She sprang to her feet in a backwards somersault, her skirts falling to cover the linen pantalettes most Kyoshins hadn't even known were part of the uniform, until Ty Lee arrived. And she beheld a very plainly dressed princess of the Fire Nation standing on her doorstep, watching her with arms crossed and a characteristic smirk on her face. She even wore her hair in a braid.

"_Azula!_" she shrieked, rushing the firebender with a bone-crushing hug for greeting. "What are you **doing** here?"

"I came to join the Kyoshi Warriors," Azula quipped, returning Ty Lee's hug before patting her twice lightly on the back to indicate she could stop hugging her now. "Turns out I've developed a fondness for facepaint." Ty Lee stepped back with a bemused grin, and the princess clarified, "I came to see you, of course."

"That's _sooo_ great!" she cried, holding out her hands as if inviting another celebratory hug. "I can't believe Zuko let you out!"

Azula frowned, and a guardedness stole over her face. For once, she looked more sad than angry at the mention of her brother. "Well, you shouldn't believe it," she said darkly. "He didn't."

"You _escaped?_" Ty Lee breathed, her eyes going wide. But seeing how unhappy Azula looked, she grabbed her hand and squeezed it in reassurance. "That's still great though," she said solidly.

"I'm sure you're the only one who thinks so," the princess observed, letting go of her hand. "But come, we have much to discuss," she gestured to Ty Lee's weathered front door with its chipped blue paint, to indicate they should go inside. "And I might be advised to do that somewhere less visible."

"Sure, come on in!" Ty Lee invited her, leading the way inside before she even remembered she hadn't cleaned since before she left for the Fire Nation.

"Sorry for the mess," she said a little sheepishly, stooping to grab some pants thrown over the beat-up old kitchen table, and tossing them through the threadbare curtain that blocked the laundry alcove from sight. This didn't do much to improve the fact that Ty Lee hadn't dusted either the furniture or the cobwebbed rafters for longer than she could remember. And she really ought to sweep out the pine needles and wood chips and dirt she tracked in on the warped wood floor.

"It's fine," Azula said absently, crossing to the couch with a few patches of stuffing poking out, and falling into it in obvious exhaustion. She leaned her head against the arm of the couch, and pinched the bridge of her nose like she had a headache.

And Ty Lee stared. Since when was Azula fine with messy surroundings? She was such a neat-freak even when they were kids that she cleaned Ty Lee's room unprompted practically every time she came over. One of the lesser-known benefits of having the princess for a friend.

"Why don't I make us some breakfast?" Ty Lee volunteered, guessing she was just distracted by being a escapee from a mental institution. That would probably turn anyone's life upside down.

"Would you?" Azula perked up visibly, and Ty Lee was glad she thought of it. "I'm starving."

"You've been eating enough, right?" Ty Lee asked, dumping the broth from last night out the window over her kitchen sink, and balancing the pot on top of a growing pile of dishes. She grabbed a frying pan from underneath the counter, and set it on top of the pot belly stove adjacent.

"Of course, just —" Azula looked unaccountably annoyed, sitting up on the couch. "I haven't since last night."

"Yeah, I hate missing breakfast too. I'll make us some omelets, okay?" Ty Lee said, ducking down the narrow hall and out the back door before Azula could answer. She threw open the trap door of the little lean-to in the back yard beside her garden, and descended the steps to the cool root cellar, her mind whirling.

Azula was free! What would she do now? Ty Lee wondered, gathering the eggs and peppers and nearly empty jar of lard she needed from the shelves. Would Azula just keep running until she found somewhere safe, disappear and start a new life? She didn't seem like the type…

But Zuko would search for her, he had to. She was princess of the Fire Nation, she couldn't just disappear. Well, he did shut her away in an asylum for four years, but that wasn't the same as admitting he didn't know where she was. Ty Lee climbed the steps and kicked the trapdoor shut behind her.

And Azula had a lot of enemies … including Ty Lee's friends the Kyoshi Warriors. Suki was nice enough not to say anything, but rarely, Ty Lee caught snatches of conversation between the other girls, complaining about Azula, how she got off easy when other Fire Nation military were tried, how Zuko was probably just lying to protect her…

The first time Ty Lee heard that was right after Azula almost starved herself to death. She got angry, and said some things she probably shouldn't. And after that, sometimes in a long while she would walk in on the other warriors talking and they would just stop — Just like they did now, she realized, stopping on her own back steps. Oh gosh, did they all know Azula escaped, and no one told her? Four years, and it was like they didn't trust her at all!

Ty Lee sighed and brought her stuff inside to start making breakfast. She found Azula standing before the open stove, firing some logs she stacked inside with flame from her fingertips until they blazed merrily. But the other warriors weren't wrong, were they? She was Azula's friend. Her _only_ friend, if what the princess said was true. And she would do just about anything for Azula. Anything but hurt another friend. She drew that line at the Boiling Rock, and for all her doubts, Ty Lee didn't think the princess would cross it again.

The grate closed on the fire with a squeaking of hinges. Azula looked up as if sensing her thoughts, and flashed Ty Lee a wan smile before seating herself tailor style on the floor at the kitchen table, to watch Ty Lee dice the peppers on a cutting board in silence. The acrobat made quick work of it, scraping the last of the lard from the little jar with two fingers and plopping it into the frying pan, and cracking the eggs and beating them to an even consistency with a spoon, before she dumped in the peppers. Ty Lee wiped her hands on a towel on a rung by the sink, and looked sideways at Azula, remembering.

Ty Lee had always cooked for them by mutual agreement when they had to camp out or travel alone or were otherwise separated from Azula's usual horde of servants. Mai would always set up camp, and Azula would start the fire. Then she would find a forest clearing or a nice flat stretch of ground to practice her firebending. She practiced all the time back then, and Ty Lee knew she did the same in the asylum, once Zuko let her firebend again. She wondered if Azula could still train now that she was a fugitive? Her blue flames were so unique. It seemed like it would draw attention.

"Azula?" she asked suddenly, biting her lip when she retrieved two square plates with cheerful flowers painted on them from the cabinet. The princess looked up from her contemplation of gouges cut into the tabletop, but said nothing when Ty Lee set a plate down in front of her and another at her right hand. "When did you escape?"

"My birthday," she flatly replied.

"Your …" Ty Lee echoed, trailing off. "You said not to come back for your birthday," she remembered, looking at Azula in question. "You were planning it that long?"

Azula raised an eyebrow, and Ty Lee realized she'd said something stupid. "I was planning it a lot longer than two days."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Ty Lee asked, more than a little hurt.

"Our conversations were monitored, Ty Lee," Azula wearily replied, leaning forward to cross her arms over the tabletop in front of her plate. "You must have known that."

"Oh, right." Ty Lee turned back to the stove, and scraped the bottom of the pan with the spoon to dredge up the solidifying egg. "So you made sure I wasn't there for it instead."

Silence. Ty Lee turned back to Azula to see the princess watching her without expression.

Some egg dripped from the spoon the acrobat held and onto the floor, but neither girl noticed. Ty Lee felt a tightness in her chest that presaged tears. She was surprised she managed to get the words out, when she finally asked, "Was it because — you didn't want to make me choose again? Or because," she paused painfully, "you didn't think I'd choose _you?_"

"Neither," Azula said too quickly, but dropped her gaze and shut her eyes in a way that was less than convincing. "Both. I — I don't know," she admitted, rubbing her left eye with the heel of her hand.

Ty Lee tried not to be hurt, she really did. Azula had issues with trust, she knew that. But she still couldn't help thinking, _It's like nobody trusts me at all!_ All she wanted was for everyone to like her. Was that so much to ask?

"I would have chose you," Ty Lee said softly, seating herself beside the princess to put them on equal conversational footing. She reached across the table and their empty plates to grasp Azula's arm. "It was wrong of Zuko to keep you there. I told him so, lots of times."

Azula looked up with a sad smile. "I know you did." She drew a deep breath. "And anyway, you can help me now. That's why I'm here. I need some information."

Ty Lee blinked, withdrew her hand. "What kind of information?" she asked uncertainly, laying the spoon on the table beside her.

"Nothing that would hurt anyone," Azula reassured her, guessing the reason for her hesitation. "I'm looking for my mother."

"Princess Ursa?" Ty Lee asked unnecessarily, taken aback. They had never been very close.

Azula nodded. "I have … a _theory_ where I might find her. But I want to avoid retreading the same ground as my brother. I need to know as much as you can tell me, about where Zuko has looked and what he found."

Ty Lee pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Well, Mai would update me sometimes, about what Zuko was doing," she said slowly, thinking back. A lot of this was really old news. "He looked in the colonies first, since that was easiest," Ty Lee remembered. "He sent her picture to all his governors, who sent copies to the mayors of towns and things to look for her. And I guess a few people saw her early in her banishment, but she was just passing through.

"She settled in some little Earth Kingdom village for, maybe a few months. But then she ran away just ahead of some Fire Nation troops that occupied it. She was last seen heading for the Great Divide, but that's where he lost the trail," Ty Lee said hopelessly. "I guess the guide who would have shown her across quit or something, and Zuko couldn't find him. He looked at Ba Sing Se next, and the Earth King let him review records of refugees coming into the city, and follow some leads. But none of them were her, and no one had seen her. So I guess she never went there."

Azula seemed almost lost in thought, and took a second to ask, "Did he look anywhere else?" when Ty Lee concluded her story.

"Oh yeah!" she remembered suddenly. "King Kuei lent Zuko some sandbender scouts to search the Si Wong, but they didn't find anything either. I don't know what they expected. Who'd ever want to live in a place like that? I mean, your skin would turn to leather in a month!"

Azula nodded absently, running a hand up her bare arm. Ty Lee grinned widely then, and bounced in place with anticipation. "So where do we look first?" she finally burst out, excited at the prospect of traveling again. It would be like being back in the circus, a new town every few days!

Azula looked askance at her. "What?"

"Well, you came to recruit me, right?" she laughed, arranging her hands in the familiar flame salute. "I'm at your service, Princess Azula!"

"Ty Lee," she spoke slowly, and looked almost uncomfortable, "I don't think we should travel together. We'd attract too much attention."

"But you said you came here for my help," she pointed out, crestfallen. Was it because Azula didn't trust her, or did she think she couldn't do it? She could be stealthy too, when she _tried_ at it.

"You _have_ helped," Azula said firmly, her eyes never leaving Ty Lee's face. "And you can help me best by staying right where you are. I need someone on the inside."

Ty Lee's eyes widened. Did she mean … "You mean be like, your **spy?**" she said nervously, grabbing the end of her braid to fiddle with it.

"Not exactly," Azula corrected, her eyes shadowed with exhaustion. "I just need to know there's someone who will help me if I need it, among my enemies. Someone I can trust. I need you to be," she paused as if thinking of the right words to describe this, "my safety net. Can you do that?"

Ty Lee looked right at her, but her mind was far away. Thrown back to a time four years ago when she balanced on a tightrope and Azula sat below and watched her net burn, with a smirk on her face and fist clenched in anticipation. She could have put the fire out with a wave of her hand, but she didn't…

_She's not that person anymore_, Ty Lee thought stubbornly. _She's changed._

"Of course," she said after what felt like a long time, but was probably only the space of a few heartbeats. "I'll always help you."

Azula looked about to thank her, but then made a face and turned a sickly shade of green. "The eggs are burning," she choked out, her eyes darting to the stove behind Ty Lee.

"Oh, sorry!" Ty Lee exclaimed, jumping up to pull the lightly smoking pan off the stove and dump their ruined breakfast into the sink with the rest of her dirty dishes. "I forgot about —"

But Azula hadn't stuck around much longer than _sorry_, bolting right past the open door to the tiny half-bath and out the back door to the garden, with a hand clapped over her mouth. Ty Lee ran after her just in time to witness Azula vomit noisily into the bushes to the side of her back steps. The acrobat stopped on the threshold and flinched in sympathy.

"Sorry!" she said again, wringing her hands when the princess stood straight and released the branches she tore aside so they sprang back into place, neatly hiding the evidence of her digestive upset. "I didn't mean to make you —" she fell silent and gestured to the bush instead.

"It's not your fault," Azula said grudgingly, grimacing before she wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. "This heavy Earth Kingdom food keeps making me sick."

Ty Lee blinked and followed Azula when she walked away from the house, and closer to the little fenced-in garden. "But it never bothered you before," she pointed out, tapping a finger to her lips in deep thought. "Could you still be seasick from the ride here?"

"I've been on dry land for more than an hour," she contradicted, turning to face Ty Lee and fisting her left hand in the small of her back, stretching to work out a crick in it.

"Wait a minute," Ty Lee said slowly. _Tired and hungry, but nauseous too_… "Do you only get sick in the mornings?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Ty Lee," Azula dismissed thoughtlessly. "Morning sickness is a misnom—"

She stopped, and paled visibly. This was all the confirmation Ty Lee needed.

"AAAAAAAAHHHH!" She grabbed Azula's hands and jumped up and down, squealing with all the delight of a kid in a candy store. "I can't believe I guessed it _first!_" she screamed in triumph, then stopped jumping to look curiously at her."You really didn't know?"

Azula just stood there without even trying to extricate herself. She barely seemed to hear Ty Lee. "I thought — withdrawal from the sedatives …" she said numbly. "But it's been a _month_."

"So who's the father?" Ty Lee asked, with as little embarrassment as anyone might expect, at such a personal question.

"Ty Lee…" she said, an unspoken warning in her tone. She tugged her hands from Ty Lee's grip.

"Oh, come on!" she prompted playfully. "We always loved to talk about guys —"

"He's married," Azula snapped, "and even if he weren't, completely _worthless_." Ty Lee gave over questioning her at the pained expression that flitted over Azula's face. "The less said about him, the better."

Ty Lee brushed this aside with the ease typical to her, and brightened immediately. "But who cares? You're having a _baby!_" she gushed. "You must be so —"

"_What?_" Azula cut across her angrily. "Excited? Grateful? Overjoyed? You can **stop** acting like this is some kind of _miracle_, Ty Lee!" She turned from her, fingers clenched at her sides. "I'm on the run from the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom both. This can only slow me down, and make it harder to hide. I should —" She stopped.

"Should _what_?" Ty Lee asked, her gray eyes going even wider than usual.

Azula reached up with one white hand to cover her mouth. Ty Lee appeared quickly at her side, afraid she was about to be sick again, but stopped when she glimpsed the expression on Azula's face. Her eyes filled with tears, her dark brows drew taut with anguish. And Ty Lee knew in that moment that Azula wouldn't.

She moved to stand in front of her, searching the face of her oldest friend. And an awful thought occurred to Ty Lee, one too terrible to put to words even.

This whole time, she had imagined Azula falling in love with some handsome guard who spirited her away in the middle of the night, or a brave young general who always loved her from afar and broke her out of the asylum to restore her crown… But she was pregnant, and alone. That should have been Ty Lee's first clue something was wrong.

"Azula," she said earnestly, "what happened?"

"I don't — even remember most of it," Azula admitted, looking down. Her face flushed with shame. "It might have happened to someone else. But here's the proof," she whispered brokenly, and her mouth bent with misery when she laid a hand on her stomach.

"Oh Azula…" Ty Lee said softly, eyes brimming. She pulled the princess into one of her crushing hugs, and for once, Azula returned it with equal emotion.

Her tears fell on Ty Lee's shoulder when she whispered, "Just one more way for him to _control _me." Her voice edged on hysteria, and the acrobat felt her tense as if desperate to flee. Or to fight. "I won't give him power over me, I **won't!**"

"Of course not," Ty Lee soothed helplessly, with no idea what Azula was talking about. She thought it would help her just to talk. As usual, the princess saw right through that.

"Ty Lee," she insisted, her voice muffled by the cloth of the Kyoshi uniform, "what will I _do?_"

And Ty Lee's heart broke a little, to hear how badly the news shook her confidence. But Azula had never faced anything like this before. "I don't know, but you'll think of something," Ty Lee reassured her, squeezing her friend tighter as if to infuse her with some of the acrobat's persistent optimism. "You always do."

* * *

Ty Lee eventually convinced her to come back inside, and made the princess some ginger tea to settle her stomach, while Azula went to lie down. Ty Lee walked into her spare little bedroom to find Azula sitting on the side of her unmade bed, staring at the wood plank wall instead of out the window. She hardly blinked, just downed the tea Ty Lee handed her without a word, and shook her head when the acrobat offered more.

Ty Lee took the cup from her hands, and Azula curled up on her bed facing away from her, hugging one of Ty Lee's pillows and crying silently. Ty Lee sat beside her and didn't say anything, just rubbed soothing circles on her back until she fell asleep.

Her aura was a sickening blend of her usual crimson, dark blue, and lemon-yellow, even while she slept. Ty Lee guessed she might have been wrong about the yellow meaning Azula was lying, if it stayed even while she was asleep. But there was a new color too, so close in to her body that Ty Lee didn't see it at first. White, with white sparkles. It was so pretty, Ty Lee wished she knew what it meant.

Once she was sure Azula was asleep, she went to draw some water from the pump, rolled up her sleeves, and did the dishes. It was tedious work, but fairly mindless. And it gave Ty Lee time to think while she stared out the window at the pine trees.

What would Azula do now? It was a good question. She seemed to have forgotten her immediate goal in the shock of finding out she was pregnant, but Ty Lee doubted she would give up just because she was having a baby…

Wow, Azula with a baby. It was hard to imagine. But he'd be next in line for the throne, after Lu Ten and Azula herself. Unless — did illegitimate children still inherit? Ty Lee should know this, she used to be a noble.

Or maybe she would have a girl! Ty Lee hoped she had a girl, one who looked just like her. Ty Lee wondered what the father looked like. Azula didn't seem to want to talk about —

A knock sounded at the front door, and Ty Lee was so startled she dropped her dish in the sink, splashing the front of her uniform. "Oh no!" she whispered, quickly drying off her hands. If anyone found out Azula was here…

She opened the door to find Kaede on her step in full uniform, her painted oval face grim beneath her rectangular headdress. "Ty Lee, I have some news that may come as a shock," she said without preamble, blunt as usual. She narrowed blue-gray eyes in question at the soaked front of Ty Lee's dress, but then decided not to ask.

"Uh, WHAT IS IT?" Ty Lee said loudly, though she had a sinking feeling she knew already. Oh gosh, she hoped Azula was as light a sleeper as she remembered…

Kaede gave her a strange look. "Princess Azula has escaped confinement, and we just had a bird from Omashu. It looks like she's heading this way."

"Omashu?" Ty Lee echoed, bewildered. Then she frowned, remembering. "HOW LONG HAVE YOU KNOWN SHE WAS OUT?!" she demanded, hopefully with enough anger to justify the volume of her voice.

Kaede flinched from her yelling, and took a step back from where Ty Lee stood with the doorknob in hand, blocking the threshold. "A week or two," she admitted, "but Suki advised me not to tell the other girls unless we got directly involved. Some of them have guessed though…"

Her eyes fixed on something behind Ty Lee, and she stopped. "Are you expecting company?" Kaede asked instead.

The something behind her was the two unused plates still sitting on the kitchen table. Ty Lee hoped she didn't look as nervous as she felt. "Uh, yeah!" she confirmed in a high, thin voice. "I thought Shan Mo might stop by. I haven't seen him since he went on that fishing trip."

"The men won't be back for five more days. You know that, Ty Lee," Kaede said impatiently, her painted eyebrows lowering in the morning sun. "What's going on here?"

"Nothing's going on!" Ty Lee held up her hands to placate her, increasingly desperate. "Seriously, _nothing!_" Oh, Azula was right, she was _so_ bad at this…

"Then you won't mind if I come in," Kaede said flatly, and pushed past an unresisting Ty Lee without waiting for permission. She looked briefly about her and then headed directly for the bedroom, the only door that was closed.

"Don't go in there!" Ty Lee cried behind her, but Kaede threw open the door and walked in anyway. On an empty room. Ty Lee almost fainted with relief. "I haven't cleaned in forever," she explained, smiling weakly when her squad leader glanced back at her in question.

Then Kaede looked out the open window. And for the first time in the four years Ty Lee knew her, she cursed.

"_Azula!_" the acrobat cried, spotting the princess running lightly through the trees at the same time, clutching a bundle to her chest. Azula gave the merest glance over her shoulder to indicate she had heard, but dodged through the brush and among the tree trunks even faster.

Kaede was quick to give pursuit though, jumping out the window with her fan clutched in hand, and Ty Lee right behind her. _Oh gosh, oh gosh, oh gosh_, Ty Lee thought desperately, following her squad leader when she moved to cut off Azula at the next rise on the way back to the harbor. The princess was fast, but she didn't know the terrain like the Kyoshi Warrior did.

Ty Lee bit her lip, but moved to cover the other side of the small clearing they reached just ahead of Azula, at Kaede's jerk of the head. What if they fought? She couldn't let anyone hurt Azula! But she couldn't betray her fellow warrior —

Azula burst into the clearing and stopped short at the sight of them standing in the dappled sunlight, throwing aside the burlap bag she carried to draw the first two fingers of both hands. Up close, Ty Lee could see flyaway strands of hair come loose from her braid. Her eyes were still bloodshot and her nose red from crying. Even unflappable Kaede seemed surprised to find her in such obvious distress.

But Azula spoke quickly, before either could get a word in. "I doubted you would **help** me," she reproached Ty Lee, her tone so poisonous the acrobat flinched. "But I never thought you would **betray** me to _them!_" She threw a hand out to indicate Kaede and a burst of flame in her direction, but the Kyoshi Warrior dodged and deflected the offhand attack with her gilded fan.

"Azula —" Ty Lee started, heartbroken at her misunderstanding. But she stopped at the subtle wink Azula gave her, visible only from where the acrobat stood. And she remembered. _I need someone on the inside_…

"Well, you were wrong!" Ty Lee shouted, balling her fists and stamping her foot in conspicuous anger. "I _hate_ you! You're **mean**, and I hate you for ALL TIME!" she repeated for good measure, with a dramatic sweep of her hand like she had seen Zuko do sometimes.

Kaede had drawn her katana, but actually lowered it along with her fan to glance at Ty Lee in disbelief. Azula, being Azula, took that opportunity to shift into a cobra stance, one arm up and hand pointed while she bent the other along the same line. And almost quicker than Ty Lee could follow, she brought her arms down and around, spinning low to charge her attack before she scissor-kicked an arc of blue flame at Kaede that knocked the Kyoshi Warrior off her feet, sent her fan flying into the bushes, and set her sleeve on fire.

The unarmed Ty Lee somersaulted behind the princess when she made for Kaede, but Azula dodged the _chi_-blocking punches Ty Lee aimed at her back, with a high flaming kick the acrobat ducked hastily. Azula carried her momentum in a sort of rolling cartwheel that put some space between them, while Kaede rolled on the ground to put out the fire on her sleeve and sprang back to her feet at the same time as Ty Lee.

Ty Lee shot a glance at Kaede, who nodded sharply and covered her approach with a flurry of overhanded strikes from her katana. Azula gave ground but lashed back with two punched fireballs that Kaede only partially deflected with the retractable shield fixed to her forearm, at the cost of singing her skirts and fighting one-handed.

But Azula didn't stand against Ty Lee, when the acrobat came at her from the side with fingers joined and hands outstretched. The princess ducked swiftly, sweeping her leg out to send them both scrambling back from an arc of flame. She ran the other way toward the line of trees of that grew so densely on this side of the island, with both warriors in close pursuit. And she kept running, up the trunk of the nearest tree to backflip over their heads with a burst of fire from her sandaled feet.

Ty Lee couldn't help grinning up at Azula, when the princess flipped overhead. It was always so cool to see her combine firebending with the acrobatics Ty Lee taught her. It made her feel a warm glow of accomplishment inside, as if _she_ were the one to pull that off.

Luckily, her squad leader was more focused on Azula than on Ty Lee right now, and didn't catch it. The Kyoshi Warrior pressed the princess on her landing, but no sooner had Azula touched down than she ducked one swipe and danced away from another, winding up first one kick and then a second with fire at her heels that threw Kaede hard into the trunk of a tree when Azula let it fly.

Ty Lee was checked in her advance when the other warrior fell to lay unmoving at the foot of the tree, and looked to Azula almost instinctively in question. The princess just shrugged and walked to where she dropped her bag, so Ty Lee jogged over to squat down beside Kaede and make sure she was okay.

"She's breathing alright, I guess she's just knocked out," Ty Lee said, withdrawing her fingers from where she held them under Kaede's nose to check.

"That's a relief," Azula replied, shouldering her pack with the subtle hint of sarcasm Ty Lee only picked up because she knew her for so long.

"Azula!" she half-laughed, half-scolded when she climbed to her feet. "That's not very nice!"

"Well, neither am I," the princess pointed out, with a hint of her old smirk.

Ty Lee smiled walking up to her. It was good to see her back in form. Most people didn't realize Azula had a sense of humor, 'cause it was kind of a black humor. But when she lost it, that was always a bad sign.

"Listen, you're going to be fine," Ty Lee said intently, gripping Azula's shoulder as a gesture of support. "You're the most beautiful, smartest, perfect girl in the world!" she effused. "There's _nothing_ you can't do, right?"

Azula nodded once, a sharp jerk of her chin, as if she grew weary of the subject. "They should find you unconscious," she said abruptly, and Ty Lee blinked before she realized Azula was talking about the other Kyoshi Warriors. "There will be less questions that way."

She took a step back before Ty Lee stopped her with a hand on her arm. "Don't worry, I can take care of that myself," she said brightly, indicating the pressure point she could pinch on her own neck to knock herself out. Ty Lee had ended up practicing that move on herself and volunteers of varying willingness a lot of times, before she got it right.

"Alright," Azula replied, and moved to leave. But Ty Lee hugged her once more, fiercely, too aware that she might not get the chance again for a long time.

"I'll see you soon," she said in parting, and tried not to let it sound like a question. She hoped Azula would answer it anyway.

"And you," the princess replied, hugging her briefly back.

Ty Lee watched Azula climb the next rise on her way back to the harbor, and disappear into the brush with a glance behind for farewell. Her nose wasn't red anymore, but Ty Lee thought she looked pale. She wished Azula didn't have to go alone — well, Ty Lee guessed she wasn't actually _alone_, but still …

She sat down next to the unconscious Kaede, folding her legs under her in what she hoped was a natural pose, and pinched the left hollow of her neck. _Be safe_, was her last thought to her absent friend, before the heaviness fell over her with pins and needles, dragging her down to darkness and the black earth of the woods.

* * *

Azula too walked under a growing weight swiftly through the trees, though just why, she couldn't say. That wouldn't come for a few months yet, would it? Along with a prominent belly that would only draw more attention to her, a shift in her center of gravity that would make her too clumsy to fight or even train effectively…

And a baby she never wanted or asked for. There was that too.

Azula took a moment to wonder if this was how her mother felt about her. If Ursa ever considered ending it, ending _her_ before she ever came into the world. Her mother hadn't wanted another child, Dad told her. Their marriage had already soured by then, and she was happy in her precious son.

But Zuko was a weakling, her father knew it even then. So he demanded another, and her mother complied. She might have acted in secret to prevent him, maybe even did a few times before Azula… But she could not deny him forever. So Ozai got his wish. And Azula got a mother who hated her existence.

Could she do that to a child? Azula asked herself, fighting her way through some of the denser undergrowth that blocked her path, in the weak sunlight that shone down through the trees. Even if it lived — and with such unfortunate paternity, there was every chance it wouldn't — could Azula give it that kind of start?

_You had a father who loved you_, she reminded herself, breaking into a run without conscious decision. How many times did she tell herself that was enough? Enough that he wanted her, enough that he saw her worth?

This baby, if it lived, wouldn't have even that. Her brother had been happy enough to take advantage, but he didn't ask for this either. And Zuko never took responsibility for anything, unless it made him look good. His failings were always someone else's fault. Usually hers.

Azula was breathing hard and tears welled in her eyes, by the time she jumped a shallow gulley and sprinted from the cover of the trees and out onto an overgrown, grassy stretch beneath a dull white sky. This gave way to the wood-hewn shops and bars with their steep thatch roofs that abutted the North harbor. She blamed the hormones. She blamed her brother, damn him. Damn him. Halfway around the world, and still managed to ruin her life…

She stopped, when she saw a round-faced girl in the elaborate uniform of a Kyoshi Warrior wander out from the byway between two outbuildings. The girl spotted her almost immediately, and yelled, "Warriors!" behind her. And they appeared at her side with impressive speed, two lining up on the right and one on the left, while Azula dropped her bag beside her and crossed her arms casually to meet them.

They adopted the same lopsided V formation they had when Azula last fought them with Mai and Ty Lee, in the foothills along the East Lake. This left the girl who found Azula standing at the vanguard, a place that — unlike their missing leader — she hadn't chosen. Azula smirked at the fear she tried to hide, still evident in every line of her body and the set of her painted brows. _Amateurs_.

The round-faced girl clenched her jaw, and in one practiced motion, led the other warriors in unfurling their war fans and collapsible shields. "You might have snuck in somehow, but you're not leaving this island!" she promised harshly.

Azula knew they wouldn't attack first, and leveled a flat stare at them until the leader flinched visibly. They fancied themselves as defenders, not aggressors. Azula counted that about as smart as fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

"You can have no idea what a _bad day _this has been," she said slowly at last, to the surprise of her foes. "The one person I want most to hurt isn't here. And now, **you** propose to stop me?" She slid fluidly into stance, with her left foot leading, her right arm bent back while the other shielded her core. She kept her forefingers pointed and ready to fire.

"I wiped the floor with you once, and I can do it again," Azula reminded them. "So go ahead. Give me a reason."

Her reason came in the form of the two warriors on the right flank, who glanced to each other at the conclusion of her speech. Azula swept her right arm down to pick off the tall one nearest the edge with an underhanded strike. She held her shield slightly too low, and Azula's fire struck it at the right angle to drive the shield in under her chin with an audible _crack_. She dropped like a sack of rocks.

_Good_, Azula thought. That asymmetry was bothering her.

To their credit, the three remaining didn't waste time gaping at their fallen comrade or threatening retribution, but finally charged. The warrior out front handed off her fan to her fellow on the left, who sent both slicing toward Azula. She ducked one fan with a flare of fire from her outstretched foot, at the same moment as she snatched the other from the air — and jumped to her feet just in time to dodge the katana thrust at her by the headlong rush of the lead warrior.

Azula threw her hand out though, angling the war fan to catch the point of the blade in its panels. Her assailant was moving too fast to stop from punching clean through the fan with a hideous shriek of metal on metal, or to stop Azula from wrenching her sword clean out of her hands.

The princess snatched up the hilt with a turn of her wrist and pivoted neatly, kicking the Kyoshi Warrior a handwidth up from her tailbone on her way past. And their _de facto_ leader crumpled with a strangled cry when her back spasmed and her legs gave out under her. Azula smiled coldly at her obvious surprise, only exaggerated by the outdated makeup she wore. These sad relics weren't the only ones Ty Lee instructed.

Azula tore the sword free of the war fan, and tossed the latter back to the same warrior who threw both fans at her to begin with, and now ran forward with fingers joined for _chi_-blocking. The older girl with a pinched face wore her hair in three buns, two of which stuck out from the sides of her head like an extra pair of ears. She caught the fan in both hands, breaking her charge in surprise at Azula's underhanded toss —

That second bought, Azula angled the sword behind her to parry a strike at her unprotected back, turning with the blow to face her opponent and keep the other Kyoshi Warrior in sight. The swordswoman was short as Azula herself, her black hair bound up in a bun so big it must have wrapped around some kind of insert.

Azula considered them coolly when they fell back to regroup, failing to see the appeal. But then, Ty Lee always did have bad taste when left to her own devices. It was probably inevitable this would extend to her chosen companions.

The _chi_-blocked Kyoshi Warrior behind them bit back a cry of pain when she tried (and failed) to drag herself closer. Her two partners were visibly affected by her suffering, but glared flinty-eyed at Azula instead of attending to it. _They're learning_, she acknowledged to herself, with a calculated smirk. Azula didn't need to say a word, just raised one finger of her left hand, then another. Counting off.

Big Bun broke first, running at Azula with katana held high and a war cry on her painted lips. "Nami!" Four Ears yelled behind her in warning, close on her heels. Azula braced to meet her, her stolen sword gripped in both hands at shoulder height.

She held until the last second, then broke left and stepped into her feint, forcing her to commit to a strike at Azula's flank. But Azula stabbed her katana down to catch the blow, one hand grasping the hilt and the other braced behind the blade, to distribute the force of the blow. Nami wasn't so lucky. Her own sword made contact with Azula's near the hilt, so the impact shivered back along her arm and she dropped the blade.

Azula couldn't capitalize though, when the other warrior moved in behind her to strike for her pressure points. But without Ty Lee's acrobatics, her attempt was rather obvious. Azula whirled away from one jab and at the next, fended her off with a slice of the katana.

Four Ears caught the blow on her shield, and tried to swing this wide to clip Azula with its edge. The princess danced back out of the way, but didn't fail to note how the attempt overextended her. Azula tripped her with a high kick that carved an arc of fire in the air and sent her sprawling on her back, with a yelp of surprise at the burning hem of her skirts.

A minute's swordplay, and they forgot that she could firebend. It might almost be funny, if it wasn't just sad.

The warrior rolled away to smother the flames, but Azula nailed her in the temple with the flat of the blade when she tried to get to her feet. Her victory was short-lived, when Nami pressed the attack so fiercely Azula nearly tripped over the body of her unconscious foe in her haste to retreat and counter.

The rain of blows was almost more than Azula could keep up with, her training with blades being nowhere near as extensive as, for example, her brother's. She would not sustain this pace for long, now that her remaining attacker could press her advantage, and didn't have to fight around a _chi_-blocking partner. It was time for Azula to press her own advantage.

Azula rolled to the side, throwing the katana at her knees when she tucked. The move was just stupid enough from a swordfighting perspective to accomplish her purpose, as the second Nami had to spend batting the blade aside let Azula dig heels into the grass to cancel her momentum — and punch the Kyoshi Warrior through the shuttered window and plaster wall of a business at her back, with a concussive burst of blue fire.

Her flames crackled orange around the ragged edges of the hole left by the forceful ingress. Azula stood and let down her fists, seeing no movement in the smoky interior. Most of the patrons of bars and shops had poured into the dirt streets by now, drawn by the fight. Some gaped at her while others just glared dully, but none moved to interfere when she walked briskly over to her burlap bag, and threw the strap over one shoulder.

The _chi_-blocked Kyoshi Warrior had nearly managed to squirm over to the blade she threw to end the fight — her own sword, the princess recalled — when Azula kicked it out of her reach. "Never bring a sword to a firefight," she said amiably, looking down into the sweat-streaked face of her opponent. "Sokka's little tart might have told you so, if she ever bothered to learn."

"**Gloat** all you like, there's _nowhere_ you can hide!" the round-faced girl retorted tearfully, her gloved fists balled on the grass in frustration. "They're going to catch you and take your **head** off!"

"Trusting to the competence of others," Azula observed dryly, spreading her hands. "Always a sound strategy. Well, I'll leave you to it."

She moved to walk away, noting the villagers hadn't come any closer. Several of them had disappeared back inside, probably looking for weapons if they weren't hiding outright, though the former option seemed more likely. Despite their independence from the mainland, these islanders showed all the tenacity of earthbenders. And for all that Azula could probably blast enough of them to ashes to make an instructive example, that would hardly contribute to her friendship with Ty Lee. It was time to leave.

"Thanks, by the way," Azula added over her shoulder to the defeated warrior, the ghost of a smile gracing her lips. "I needed this."

She walked to the low wooden piers that jutted out into the small inlet, walked briskly but didn't run. The ramshackle buildings clustered closely around the water, and it wasn't far to go. Azula let heat pour off her body as she went, until the air shimmered around her. As potent a warning as flames in her hands, but less hostile.

And it worked the first part of the way. The overwhelmingly male assortment of barflies, shoppers, and merchants parted for her, a few slipping off at the edges of her vision to assist the fallen warriors left in the field behind, a few even restraining villagers who came back with clubs, swords, and daggers spoiling for a fight … for their own protection.

Azula didn't look back, but she could hear the shouted arguments and scuffles breaking out behind her, and knew this peace — like any — wouldn't hold. It was an unstable equilibrium, and soon enough, that violence would direct itself at her. Unless she preempted it first.

So, stopping near the water's edge, Azula threw her pack onto the jetty, turning about and into stance. The crowd — whose anger had predictably overwhelmed their common sense — still ran at her when she began her kata. _Turn, left arm out, right fist down, spin low and bring it in_… Proving there was not a bender among them, they didn't think to hesitate until fingers of flames licked from her fist, and leaping high, Azula tucked her left foot close and carved a perfect arc of fire through the air with her right.

Azula touched down with one arm thrown behind her for balance and punched the sand. And blue flames flared from her fist like phoenix wings, surging to twice her own height when they seared down the beach in either direction, drawing a line of fire in the sand. Her attackers scrambled back with gasps and a few yells, when her fire fused the grains to glass and leapt high to hide her from view, fed by her _chi_. Even those who fought the Fire Navy would not have seen this kata, taught almost exclusively for exhibition firebending. Azula herself hadn't practiced it in a few months, and was gratified she remembered it so well.

There were a half-dozen sailors watching from the piers and the three craft tied there, including the tourist boat she took here from Chin Village. "I hope you can swim," Azula told them before she fired the piers, a wall of flame still burning at her back.

It turned out they could.

Shouldering her pack, Azula jogged through flames that parted at her feet, and leapt aboard a small junk more suited to her needs. She let the wall of blue fire die behind her, cut the rope that tied her boat to the pier with a dagger of flame, and walked aft to take the rudder in one hand, and jet out of the harbor with the other.

The islanders who tried to mob her pressed as close as they dared to the burning piers, just visible through the flicker of flames. They waved a motley assortment of weapons, and shouted threats and curses after her. Azula sighed when the wind filled her sails and bore her away from the island. Was it going to be like this in every town that recognized her? How tiresome.

She sat by the rudder and watched the mountains of Kyoshi Island grow smaller to the south, backed by dark clouds. From here, the multitude of trees blended to a continuous blanket of green, and the primitive houses with their thatch roofs weren't even visible. She couldn't even tell where Ty Lee lived from this distance, though she managed to find her on the island proper.

Azula wondered if any suspicion would fall on Ty Lee for her visit here. She had done her best to cover for them both, but the acrobat was a terrible liar. Which Azula considered, was probably why she decided not to pursue that career in acting she used to go on about.

And she paused, startled to recall some conversation overheard on the ride in. It had been six years to the day Ty Lee ran away for the circus, she realized. And now it was Azula leaving her behind.

An invisible weight seemed to settle in her stomach when she thought back to that, the worst day of her life until she lost the Agni Kai…

_The thirteen year old Azula just managed to pull the door closed on her room, praying Ty Lee would take the hint and her advice, and leave the palace while she still could. It was a struggle just to let go of the handle. Her head swam so that she had to grip the panels of the wall just to keep from losing her feet, when she staggered after the servant sent to summon her down the lamplit hall._

_She felt like she swallowed broken glass, like something tore inside her. Azula had been bleeding on and off all day, but it was worse now, so much worse. She just changed into her ceremonial armor, and her thighs were slick with the sticky wetness already. Soon she would leave a trail, and everyone would know —_

_No one could know, no one could _ever_ know, she remembered, forcing herself to take one step, then another. He said, never tell…_

_But how could she still be bleeding? Azula wondered desperately, falling even farther behind the serving girl who didn't dare look back, when a fresh cramp nearly doubled her over. How could there be anything still left inside her? He said that this would end it, he said that it was safe. Their own court physician handed her the prescription, and told her how to brew the tea._

_It was too late for these doubts, she told herself, gripping her stomach with one hand while she clawed her way along the wall with the other. The time for doubt, if it had ever been, was gone. _

_Tears of pain welled in her eyes when she shuffled down the paneled hall, trying to make up the distance. She wouldn't let them fall. She couldn't fall. Her father was waiting for her, and she couldn't disappoint him. Especially now…_

_He had said it was his fault. He miscalculated. She couldn't have known. He spoke so softly when he said it, he didn't even sound like himself. But that it happened at all suggested a lack of control. She had to prove she was still in control, always in control. She had to prove he could depend on her in anything —_

_Her knees hit the tile floor before she realized she was falling, and a strangled wail burst unbidden from her lips. The servant noticed then, but her panicked questions barely registered with Azula. Her own body wouldn't answer her. When she tried to get her feet under her or even brace her hands against the floor, something twisted up inside her. Until the only thing that made the pain abate even a little was to curl into a quivering ball on the floor and wrap her arms around her stomach, as if literally to hold herself together. That wouldn't last, she knew._

_The older girl hovered anxiously near her, bent over the princess but afraid to touch her. Maybe she thought it was contagious. She was just asking what was wrong again when Azula managed to grasp her wrist. She was too weak to stop the stupid girl flinching away, but at least managed to focus her attention._

_"Get — doctor —" Azula choked out, shivering uncontrollably. A cold heaviness settled over her like a blanket of snow. Her fingers curled, but her hand still lay where she dropped it. And the servant girl seemed frozen in horror, staring with eyes wide as saucers at something near Azula's feet._

_The blood wouldn't soak through the leather of her skirt or probably even show against the crimson cloth of her pants, but it didn't need to, when it crept across the tiles to pool under her instead. Azula could see it, when she just turned her head._

_"_Go!_" she mustered the authority to snap at her, and the girl started visibly and finally obeyed._

_It was only when she was gone and the abandoned hall grew dim around her, that Azula let her tears fall. It was only then she let herself wonder, if her father intended this all along…_

_It was all training. She knew that, he knew that. But he had been very clear. No one else could know. They wouldn't understand. It would mean the end of his reign as Fire Lord, the end of her place in the line of succession. And Azula had honored his wishes. She never told. But what if he decided the risks outweighed the benefits —_

No. _He needed her. He needed her. Zuko could never succeed him, hadn't he said so? He needed her to succeed him…_

He could always have more children_, whispered the cruel voice of her doubt. _With someone who isn't his daughter_. She choked back a sob._

_But then … why send Ty Lee away? Azula grasped at the possibility. He must not want her to know what they did, but — _But why bother to hurt you, when what he really meant was to _kill_ you?

_She shuddered, bending in on herself. It occurred to her in that moment that there was something profoundly wrong with her life, if this was the only explanation she could find for it._

_She wished she hadn't sent Ty Lee away._

_She wished it until the same image came unbidden to her mind, as when her friend revealed her father's hand in this. Ty Lee with a scar like Zuko's, smiling, still smiling until she winced. And the same pain blossomed in her chest as before, surpassing what she felt now as the sun surpassed the moon._

_She couldn't let it happen. She couldn't — let —_

_She couldn't feel her limbs. The hall went black._

_The first time Azula woke up after that, she didn't know how much time had passed. She was in too much pain to register where she was or care what had happened. She cried until someone came to sedate her. It didn't take long._

_She learned more each time she struggled back to consciousness, usually around sunrise, if the angle of the light through the window that opened on a courtyard was any indication. She was in a bed in the palace infirmary, the same bed they put her brother in when Dad scarred him, ironically enough. Her armor was gone, replaced by one of the robes she typically slept in. She lit a flame in her palm, and it still burned blue._

_Her father was never there when she woke. She wondered if he came while she slept. She wondered if she even wanted him to._

_The fourth time she woke, she told them to stop sedating her. And they did._

_Some time later, she looked up to see her father standing in the door, his crown gleaming in the light from without. "Azula," he greeted her, strangely subdued._

_"Father," she replied. He drew a chair up beside her bed and took a seat as if this were an invitation. Not that he needed one. Azula tried to sit, but only pulled herself halfway up before she winced, and had to relax against the pillow. Her father frowned at that, just like she knew he would._

_"Doctor Lao has told me of your progress," he said, watching her closely. "I am pleased to see you have improved."_

_"Yes, Father," she replied automatically, staring at her hands where they lay neatly folded in her lap. It was disrespectful not to look at him when he was speaking, but she couldn't seem to do it._

_"He says you will be able to resume your duties as crown princess in a few days' time," he offered. And she closed her eyes at this, feeling as if the longer he sat there, the less air there was in the room._

_"My daughter," he spoke quietly then, and laid his heavy hand atop both of hers. His hand was warm, and his touch was gentle. She raised her eyes to his face and traced the line of his jaw, the arch of his brows, the slant of his eyes. All features he passed on to her._

_This was kinder than she could remember him being in a long time. It should have made her feel better. But it didn't._

_"There is no reason," Ozai spoke slowly, "this ever needs to happen again. There are precautions we can take…"_

_She stared at him openly then, her breath catching in her throat. He couldn't mean — She almost died. _She almost died._ He didn't need to say so when she could read it on his face, when she had only to remember —_

_She almost died, and he wasn't going to stop._

_He must have felt her hands jump under his, because Ozai tightened his grip, his hand grown hot enough to sear her skin. A warning of what she could expect if she failed him. Azula knew better than to betray any sign of discomfort._

_"You _do_ see the necessity of your training," her father said quietly, his golden eyes fixed on hers. It wasn't a question, and Azula knew better than to answer it, just held his gaze. "Your small build puts you at a physical disadvantage. And there are those who would oppose you as Fire Lord because of your sex. _

_"You will be the first female ruler in the history of our nation," he reminded her unnecessarily. "You will face unforeseen threats, and for that, you will need unforeseen defenses. Tell me, Azula —" he said almost sharply, "which is more deadly, the sword raised against you on the field of the battle, or the dagger at your throat as you sleep?"_

_"The dagger," she swiftly replied, having answered this question before._

_"Correct," he acknowledged, inclining his head. "But you have the potential to be both. There will always be those who underestimate you, because you were born second, or born a woman." She knew he spoke from experience, and felt the same warm glow she always did inside, when he shared that with her. "Do not let it gall you as I did, my dear._

_"When you learn to make a hidden strength of weakness, their ignorance becomes your gain. It is my intention you should learn. Is that your intention?"_

_"Yes, Father," she steadily replied._

_Something in her tone must have convinced him this time, for he nodded and relaxed his grip. "I am glad to hear it." He stood then, and surprised her by bending to place a light kiss on her forehead, his big hand cupping her chin. He hadn't done that since she was a little girl, and Azula looked up at him in question when he withdrew._

_"I am proud of your discretion in this matter, Azula," he confided. "Your reaction to the herb was … unexpected. And Lao will pay dearly for it, once your recovery is complete," he promised darkly, then grew more circumspect._

_"I did not mean to harm you," her father said intently. "I hope you never doubted that."_

_"I never did," Azula said quietly. That almost-smile tugged at the corners of his mouth then, and she knew that he was pleased. It was the first time she succeeded in lying to her father._

_Azula felt hollow inside._


	13. A Start

**So ... two months later and a new chapter. I fear I have no excuse for the lateness of this release, excepting a long string of petty annoyances, including totaled car, unhelpful insurer, and the ever popular job-consumes-my-life. There have been some good things though, like spending more time with my family. Still sorry for the late release.**

**You have no idea how happy it made me to see so many reviews last chapter, and all of them constructive and/or positive. I'm so thankful for your input, and I've considered several times replying by PM to every review. But I have the feeling that it would quickly become a process of you: submit review, me: Hey, thanks! Since most of you don't ask questions (or at least ones I can answer without too many spoilers). So I think I will stick to a general thanks for now, but ... if you ever want to discuss the story at more length or want quicker answers to your questions than waiting for the next update (and author's note), do feel free to PM me.**

**To reply to some of those questions: JLBB ... another really in-depth analysis, and your observations on Ty Lee's significance to Azula, and their partings and coming together, is spot-on. We will learn more about Ozai's relationship to Azula as the story progresses (kind of). A lot of other stuff going on there too, of course. I know several of you have asked about Ozai, and we will get some news of him this chapter.**

**Shade of gray ... I can see your point about the wording, though the example you cite was actually deliberate on my part. I thought "business" sounded more descriptive (of the function of the building) than just "building." I try to be as descriptive as I can, while at the same time aiming for economy in my word choice. Which may be hard to believe, given my regular 10K+ chapters, but it's true. This is a balance that can be hard to achieve, and sometimes clarity may suffer for it. I do have a beta reader, and edit obsessively even as I write. But if you want to point out any more examples that you think need a second look, please do. And I'll give them a second look.**

**So many kind (and constructive!) words for the last chapter, that I just want to say thank you again. And special thanks as always to Meneldur, whose input on the first three sections helped me clarify my thoughts, and the writing.**

**Another 13K chapter here, roughly. But again, there's a lot going on. I'm particularly interested in your reaction to Mai and Zuko, and wonder what you'll make of King Bumi. He's kind of difficult to write for, but a fun challenge to take on. In any event, happy reading. And please review...**

* * *

Zuko opened his eyes on the underside of a finely worked bronze canopy, and the shadows that gathered there even in daylight. He slept past sunrise. More significant was the fact that he slept the whole night through. No dreams. No nightmares either.

Iroh had gone several days ago, and reluctantly left his servants with bundles of sedative herbs and detailed instructions for brewing the tea Zuko finally resorted to last night. This after two weeks of coaxing, cajoling, and finally nagging his nephew to reveal just what afflicted his conscience.

The old man had even gone so far as to pretend Mai told him, to try to get Zuko to talk. It was the kind of thing Azula would do. When Zuko realized the deceit, he was furious…

_I shouldn't have lost my temper like that_, he reflected regretfully. Throwing off the silk sheets to sit up in his boyhood bed, he swung his legs over the side and slumped with arms braced against his knees. He shouldn't have said what he did. It was unkind, if not strictly untrue. _He just wants to help me_. _He's only ever wanted to help_.

What his uncle couldn't know was that there was no help for what he did.

Zuko sighed and lurched to his feet, only for his manservants to detach themselves from their accustomed places at the bureau and clothes stand against the wall opposite, like crimson shadows in conical hats. They came forward bearing his usual dressing gown and the fresh fruit, foot washing, and hot towels they offered every morning, and he declined almost as often.

He stepped into the dressing gown and accepted an apple despite a marked lack of appetite, more out of guilt than anything. Zuko wondered how long they had been standing there, when he forgot to tell them he might sleep longer than usual this morning. With his conscience as relieved as it was likely to get today, Zuko sent one of the servants for his court chamberlain, while one made his bed, another went to draw his bath, and the last seated him in an intricately carved chair beside the bureau, to comb and style his hair into his accustomed half-topknot.

Zuko took an obligatory bite of the apple, and leaned his neck against the back of the chair to watch motes of dust dance in the sunlight falling on the woodbeams overhead, remembering happier times. Mai used to put his hair up for him, when she woke at the same time as Zuko. She wasn't much good with hair, in truth, but that hardly mattered. More often than not, it was just thinly veiled foreplay, and he would call the servants in afterward, when Mai had fallen back asleep or gone to nurse Lu Ten, and it was time to dress for his morning appointments.

But when he tried to recall those mornings now, it was his sister's slim fingers that raked through his hair, her mouth that he tasted, the warmth of her skin —

He tried not to think about what they did. He tried harder than Mai would ever credit. But sometimes it caught him unawares, in unguarded moments. A memory made all the more painful by having to wonder how much of that Azula did at their father's command, those years he abused her under the guise of training…

"Lord Zuko?" his servant prompted, probably not for the first time. He lifted his head to see the older man holding a hand glass before him, for Zuko to check his finished hair. He nodded at a reflection that looked substantially better for a sound night's sleep and, handing off the apple to his manservant, dismissed him to ready the robes and crown. With such dark thoughts as he had for company, he barely noticed the comings and goings of his palace staff anymore.

Uncle thought it started shortly after Zuko was banished. She would have been eleven. When Zuko remembered how small she was then, he wanted to kill his father all over again. It would be an empty revenge now, Iroh had finally convinced him. Ozai's burns were healing slowly in the wake of an initial infection that almost killed him, and his lungs had not improved either. Every minute he was not sedated he spent in pain, and his doctors could not believe he had lasted this long. They assured him his father would be dead before the new year, but Zuko would believe it when he saw it. The man lived to plague him, he knew.

He remembered asking Iroh if his banishment might have been planned. If his father might have sent him away just to do that to Azula, to remove the last family member she might have turned to for defense, the last witness to his crimes. He remembered the look his uncle gave him then, when he said they may never know.

He knew, Zuko thought, steepling his fingers where he sat. He just wasn't telling. Just one more lie of omission between uncle and nephew. And now it seemed the mistrust cut both ways.

Iroh had received the letter that occasioned his departure several days ago, burned it promptly after reading, and refused to discuss its contents with Zuko. He gathered, after persistent questioning, that Iroh had heard at last from one of his contacts in the Order concerning a lead on his sister. He wouldn't say who this person was or where they wrote from. He wouldn't discuss Azula's whereabouts or her condition, how this person knew her, if they knew her. Did they talk to her? Was she okay? None of it.

He insisted Zuko was safer not knowing. This was the only way to maintain what he called plausible deniability. It was a good reason not to tell him. Zuko just wondered if it was the only reason. He wondered if his uncle began to mistrust him around Azula. _If he knew what you did, he would never trust you with her again_, he reminded himself.

But Iroh didn't know what he did. He couldn't know. His uncle refused to speak to Ozai, not that Zuko was like to encourage him. And Mai would not receive the old general at her parents' house, sparking rumors she had left the palace to avoid him, rather than her husband. It was one misunderstanding Zuko could be grateful for. A lot of those rumors were already hitting too close to home.

He sighed, rising from his chair to pace the width of his room with arms crossed and a scowl etched on his face, while his manservants laid out the crown and robes of state on his newly made bed. He was so glad to see his uncle, when Iroh showed up in the door of his study. It was just what he needed. But by the time he left, Zuko couldn't have felt more differently.

The strain of weeks spent worrying Iroh would find out, that Mai would grow weary of whatever game she was playing and tell him, that he would visit his brother and the dying Ozai would throw it in his face, that Zuko would slip up and say something he couldn't take back — it was inestimable. Almost as bad as the nightmares that plagued his sleep, the doubts and fears that made his days a torment.

Worse still, he began to think his uncle felt the same way about him. He wasn't ignorant of the fact that Iroh had not looked this old and tired since he was imprisoned the summer of war's end. It was Zuko who made his life a trial now, with his tears and his rages, his secrets and silences. With his imploding personal life and troubled reign. His uncle didn't need to say so; the look on his face when Zuko walked into a room said it all. He was probably just as relieved to go as Zuko was to see him away…

"It isn't fair," he muttered darkly, drawing questioning looks from his servants. That one mistake with Azula should poison the only healthy, loving relationship he had with any blood relative. It wasn't fair.

"You sent for me, Lord Zuko?" his court chamberlain said, entering behind his manservant to execute a polite bow and flame salute in greeting to his sovereign.

"Who comes to pay court this morning?" Zuko got straight to the point, turning to regard him.

A balding, bespectacled man of middle years, his chamberlain was so militantly organized he would give even Azula a run for her money. He began rattling off appointments before he had even removed the requisite scroll from his sleeve. "Advisory Board for the Reformation of Asylums at eight o'candle; a merchants guild seeks compensation for lost wages at half-past. The Minister for Agriculture wishes to discuss projected crop shortages at a quarter 'til, and you have a nine o'candle with Minister of the Interior concerning crime rates on Ember Island…"

Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration, coming to a sudden decision. There would be little better time than now, when he was fully rested. "Clear my morning schedule," he interrupted.

The chamberlain gaped as if Zuko asked him to make the sun move backward through the sky. "My Lord?" he choked out, and Zuko bit back a sigh. The man was capable, no denying it, but he seemed to forget that annoyingly often.

"Move them to tomorrow. Halve the times for these and subsequent appointments, until you can make it fit. I have every confidence in your abilities, Han," Zuko reassured him flatly.

"Thank you, my Lord." He inclined his head. "It will be done as you command."

"Except the Advisory Board," Zuko added, raising a hand to stop the chamberlain when he made to pocket his scroll. "Have them meet me for lunch, and tell the kitchen staff to set places for them." It was the least he could do, considering Zuko had formed that committee himself, in the wake of Azula's escape and subsequent revelations about the nature of her care.

"Yes, Fire Lord," Han confirmed, replacing the scroll in his voluminous sleeve. "I will attend to it."

Zuko nodded. "You're dismissed."

The chamberlain took his leave with another bow and his hands arranged fist to palm, while Zuko turned to the oldest of his three remaining manservants. "Bring my short robes, and the cape with mantle," he said, waving a hand at the clothes they laid out for him, to indicate the servant may put them away.

It would send the wrong message to come before in her full regalia, but he didn't want to look a beggar either. Even if that was essentially what he'd been reduced to. His home had grown cold and empty as his bed of a night, without Mai and Lu Ten to share it with. That much had become painfully obvious with Uncle's departure, and he had waited long enough to face this.

The simpler robes he wore for travel and public appearances would suffice, he thought. They would also make it a lot easier to run if she decided to start throwing knives at him.

"And tell the servants to ready the palanquin," Zuko added, on his departure. "I would call on my Fire Lady."

* * *

The ship creaked beneath him with a sound like Iroh imagined his old bones would make, if they were not buried under layers of fat and muscle. The other members of the crew were busy checking the sails and rigging, and unloading cargo for sale in this colony town at the forks of the Western Sea. But one robust woman of graying hair and cheerful disposition waited for him when he climbed the gangplank. The crow's feet at the corners of her gray eyes crinkled kindly when she greeted him, "General Iroh. It is an honor."

"Please, call me Mushi," he corrected, more conscious of the need for secrecy than his contact seemed to be. Though Iroh had recruited her as an informant for the Order after her banishment, he recalled that they had never met in person.

"Of course," the woman — Rai — replied, abashed. "Would you like to speak somewhere more private?"

"That might be advisable," Iroh said genially, and let her lead him below decks to her cabin, and usher him inside. It was a little space, with a neatly made bed, a sturdy chair, a beaten old dresser and weathered mirror in the corner, and a small port window set high in the opposite wall.

"What would you have of me, Mushi?" she politely inquired, indicating the chair opposite her while she sat on the edge of her bed, in the half-light from the window. "I hope you didn't find my letter too inscrutable?"

"Not at all." Iroh smiled, seating himself in the chair she offered. "Your encryption was quite clever, and your directions, easy to follow. As you can see from the fact that I found you." He leaned forward with hands on his knees to cut to the chase. "What I really wished from you was an account of my niece's time here," Iroh admitted. "And anything you can tell me about her state of mind."

Rai seemed taken aback at that, sitting up straighter. "Well, she was not very open with me," the cook admitted. "I can only tell you what I saw." He nodded encouragement, and she told him.

Iroh listened attentively, holding his questions when she reached the part about Azula's injuries in order to let her finish. "I just can't help but feel I didn't do right by her," Rai said, looking down at white hands clasped fretfully in her aproned lap. "I should have told her sooner that I recognized her, or waited to write you until I gained her trust…"

Iroh stopped her with a hand on her knee, and a gentle shake of the head. "You would have waited a long time. My niece does not trust easily," he sighed, withdrawing his hand to sit back in the chair. "Some would say, at all. If you revealed that you knew her, she would only have run. She might even have killed you."

"No." The cook shook her head, surprising Iroh. "She makes threats when she's under duress. And she certainly knows how to sell them," Rai added, with a rueful smile. "But she never struck me as particularly bloodthirsty, either then or now. She would avoid unnecessary violence, if only to keep a low profile."

Iroh nodded thoughtfully, willing to accept that. "These injuries you mentioned," he said slowly, "bruises, a split lip, the burn on her arm…"

"A sprained ankle," the woman added wearily, when Iroh let the silence hang a moment.

"Yes," he mused. "Could they have been self-inflicted?"

Rai gave him such a chilly look that he could practically feel the temperature in the cabin drop a couple of degrees. "_No_," she said forcefully, practically glaring at him now. "The burn was quite distinct, in the shape of a hand. It was a man's hand that burned her; the mark was too large to be otherwise."

Iroh frowned at her abrupt change of demeanor, even while a weight seemed to settle in the pit of his stomach. If his niece had not done this to herself, then… "She would not tell you how she came to be hurt?" he tried once more.

The woman shook her head. "I tried to ask her about it, a few times. She would only shut me down, or change the subject."

That certainly sounded like Azula. He let out a long breath. "She could have been abused in the asylum," Iroh admitted at last, almost to himself. He only visited a few times a year, and usually observed her from a distance. What's more, all his visits were announced. The asylum staff would have had all the opportunity they needed to cover up signs of mistreatment, he realized now.

What was more troubling was the possibility his nephew had done this. It would go a long way toward explaining his obvious guilt, and Zuko had always been given to emotional excesses. Iroh knew he came back injured, from this fight with his sister he refused to talk about. It was not inconceivable Azula might have been hurt too.

The bruises and even her split lip could be the result of nothing more than a bad spill, but it was the burn that gave Iroh pause. Zuko would have had to grab and hold her for a few seconds to leave a mark that distinct, still visible several days later. And she would have been screaming in that time; contact burns were very painful, he knew from experience. He could not see what purpose it had served, except to hurt her…

"So the rumors were true," the woman Rai murmured, leaning forward with eyes downcast. "I wondered."

"Hmmm?" Iroh said absently, recalled from his thoughts.

"That she was sent to a mental institution," Rai explained, looking on him intently. "I forgot there was one on Ember Island. No one ever talks about it."

"What did you think happened to her?" Iroh asked, somewhat unnecessarily. He had probably heard every story there was about his family by now, but he was curious what this cook had picked up, traveled as she was.

"That her brother threw her in prison or banished her," the stout cook said frankly, and he frowned at her.

"Her brother showed her compassion," he corrected sternly, remembering how many of Zuko's advisers had urged just such solutions for Azula. And others more permanent.

"I would not call it compassion," she contradicted with furrowed brows, "if it was them as left those marks on her."

"He knew **naught** of this, woman," Iroh defended hotly, exhaling flames with his next breath. "You can depend on it." _But if he found out when he confronted her_…

Rai looked on him evenly. "You asked for my opinion, my pr— Mushi," she corrected, grimacing as if she found the name unpalatable. Iroh could hardly blame her for that, when he did himself. She stood to signal the end of their conversation. "And I gave it. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"One more thing," Iroh said grimly, rising in turn to push his chair away, moving slowly for the pain in his joints. "Where is the man who attacked her?"

"Dead," Rai told the woodplank floor, her voice barely breaking a whisper when she crossed white arms under her ample bust.

His eyes widened, and his hand gripped the back of the chair. "She reacted that violently?"

"No." The woman raised her eyes to his, and Iroh was reminded uncannily of his missing sister-in-law. "I did."

His shock must have registered, for Rai continued, "I never got to do for my husband, but that bastard had it coming, just like Shou did. I like to think cutting his throat restored some small measure of justice to the world."

Of course, Iroh realized too late, sick at heart. If she had been abused, of course this cook would look coldly on what she likely viewed as excuses for the abuse of Azula. Her own husband probably made her parrot lines like that, that it was an accident, she did it to herself…

"And at least it would buy her some time," Rai added quietly, moving to the crack in the warped wood door as if to check it for eavesdroppers. "Lee wouldn't live to tell what he discovered, and I said that she killed him." The cook turned to face him with a faint smile, her hand resting on the doorjamb. "It might make the crew think twice about going after her, at any rate."

Iroh could only stare, when she concluded, "Lee was never well-liked here, besides."

"Why would you do this for her?" Iroh finally asked the question that had been bothering him throughout their interview, his brows furrowed in question. "You worked in the palace from the time she was born. You were not one of her maidservants, but you must have known her reputation."

"Oh yes," the cook admitted evenly. "She was never very pleasant, and that much hasn't changed. But…" Her smile faded, and her gaze grew so distant Iroh felt sure she didn't see him standing right in front of her. "I owed her a debt."

"What debt?" Iroh asked her, and the woman closed her eyes briefly, to open them again with a fragile smile.

"My husband was — is — an imperial firebender," she explained. "To accuse him would have been impossible, just as much to run from him. I tried, more than once. But I never got far. Until the day she set me free.

"You see," Rai said warmly, taking a step closer, "she banished the kitchen staff before her guards. She gave me the head-start I needed to escape him. My work keeps me far from the Fire Nation most of the year, and he hasn't found me since."

"Rai," he said quietly, a little concerned for her sanity at this point, "you must know she didn't mean to help you. She banished her servants because she was crazy, not out of any altruistic urge."

She shook her head once, as if amused at his misunderstanding. "I don't care what she meant," the woman insisted, with a faith that Iroh found a little disturbing. "I just care that she helped me. And —" She paused, considering him before she admitted, "those years Prince Zuko was banished, her father kept her so close."

Iroh felt as if the bottom dropped out of his stomach, when he realized where she was going with this.

"She turned up all manner of strange injuries," Rai continued, ignoring his discomfort, "and even disappeared for a week once. There were some as said he killed her. And those were the least of the rumors." She pursed her lips and looked intently at him.

"There was something … _wrong_ there," she said at last, grimly. "Everyone knew it. And no one did anything." She looked away. "Not even me."

"He was the Fire Lord," Iroh pointed out, when he managed to speak again. This was almost as awkward as talking to Zuko about it.

"And she was a piece of work," Rai finished bluntly, holding his gaze. "I know. She was also a child, with no one to treat her like one. I thought I might be someone to look out for her, even years too late," the cook said, looking down. "But I couldn't even do that right."

"I think you helped her more than you know," Iroh said kindly, touching her arm in reassurance. "I at least am glad _you_ found her, and not someone who would take advantage." She nodded with lips pressed tightly together, and Iroh guessed she would say no more.

"Thank you for all you have told me." He fished out a coin purse from the broad sash of his robe, and handed it to her in repayment of the gold Azula stole and for her information. "It was most instructive."

He had just moved to leave when her other hand closed over his, and he glanced at her in question. "General Iroh," she said, so gravely he did not consider correcting her. "I said you would do right by her.

"She really seems to hate you," Rai continued, before he could ask her meaning. "And she may refuse your help, even if you offer it. But I told her you would help her." Her gaze was so importunate he could not think of denying her. "Please prove me right."

"That is just what I intend," Iroh solemnly replied.

She nodded and took a step back, dropping the purse in her apron pocket to take her leave with a shallow bow and flame salute. "Then may Agni light your way."

"And keep your fire in the dark," Iroh returned the traditional farewell, and touched fist to palm in contravention of the social distance between them.

He already wondered how he would keep his promise.

* * *

There was no one waiting for him, when the servants set Zuko's palanquin down outside Mai's front steps. He parted the gauzy curtains of the palanquin on tall crimson doors closed and barred, and frowned. They would have seen him coming.

Zuko disembarked the palanquin and climbed the white stone steps, leaving his palanquin bearers and an honor guard of two imperial firebenders at the gate. But the right-hand door swung inward before he could knock, to reveal about the last person he expected to see. The broad, potbellied warden of the Boiling Rock — Mai's uncle, he recalled — stood in the door. Zuko almost didn't recognize the dusky highlander in the plainly cut civilian robes he wore.

"Fire Lord," he greeted Zuko neutrally with a flame salute, though his eyes spoke hatred.

"Sir?" Zuko replied, in part because he forgot the warden's name, and in part because he knew for a fact this man hated him. Mai's uncle visited the capital and Mai several times a year, and went out of his way not to see Zuko.

"My niece has been expecting you." His wide mouth twisted with distaste. "She asked that you allow her parents a guest suite at the palace with their servants to attend them, so you might talk alone. Her household guards will still be posted at the gates and along the perimeter, of course."

Zuko blinked once in surprise, but echoed, "Of course. But what about Tom-Tom?" Lu Ten, he assumed, would stay here with Mai.

"Staying at a friend's house," the warden dismissed, stepping aside to let him enter. Zuko was surprised to see Mai's parents and some dozen servants lined up in the entry hall behind him, their worried aspects indicating a hasty assembly.

"Lord Zuko!" Mai's mother greeted him with enthusiasm, even if her smile was tremulous and her thin hands clasped nervously. "How good of you to visit. I hope you know you're always welcome here; we're _family_, after all!"

"Is this really necessary, Tsutomu?" Mai's father cut in when Zuko had just opened his mouth to reply, and promptly shut it again. _Of course_, he remembered belatedly. They named Tom-Tom for him… "He's a guest in our home! We should be here to show him hospitality."

The warden gave his bearded brother-in-law a withering look in reply. "The Fire Lady requires you come to the palace, while renovations are completed on your home," he said flatly. "And her Lord husband agrees."

"I do," Zuko chimed in dutifully at a glance from Mai's uncle, though this was the first he'd heard of it.

"I will follow, after a brief word with him," the warden added, and Mai's mother stared.

"Brother." She spoke tightly, grasping his elbow. "Please…"

"It's only a word, Rin," the warden said mildly, prying her fingers off of his arm. "I've not forgotten what you said."

"See that you don't," she admonished with a glare. And Zuko couldn't help but note that — for all Lady Rin's face was smooth planes and elegant angles, while her brother's was sags and wrinkles — they had the same eyes. _Mai's eyes_.

Lady Rin pursed painted lips, and took her husband's arm to leave the house with their servants in tow. Zuko knew she must have been flustered, because she forgot take proper leave and even prevented her husband from doing so, when she hauled the graying diplomat out his own front door.

When the little procession had cleared the gate, Mai's uncle closed the door behind them, and turned to regard Zuko in the distant sunlight from the windows at the end of the hall. Half a dozen questions occurred to him, but he kept his own council for once. He had no way of knowing how much the warden knew, or what he wanted of Zuko.

"Before we go any further, there's something I'd like to establish," Tsutomu said slowly, crossing his arms over a generous gut. "And that is that the only thing keeping me from giving you what you deserve, right here and now, is **Mai's** word. Not your guards, not your title, not your bending."

Zuko squashed the immediate impulse toward angry retort, and grasped the edge of his cape almost reflexively. Dread settled over him, with a chill like the cold sweat that broke out on his brow when the warden continued.

"And if she ever decides to _un_say that word, well … I wouldn't sleep too soundly, _Fire Lord_." He twisted the title into an insult, his narrow eyes glaring reproach. "I have friends in a lot more places than you might think. And if word gets out what you did, you're not going to have a one."

"Mai told you," he said hopelessly, realizing too late just what a bad sign it was that her uncle was here. Zuko was glad Mai had him to support her through this. But the warden would have done his utmost to poison her against him; the fact that he felt justified in threatening his Fire Lord was ample proof of that. Now Zuko had that to overcome, on top of what he already did wrong…

"Of course she did," Mai's uncle scornfully replied, and unbound his arms. "We're family. Family trusts each other. But then, a man who lays with his sister and tries to kill his father, what would you know about that?" Zuko flinched to hear it stated so baldly. The warden walked a few paces around him with hands clasped behind his back, until Zuko had to turn to keep him in view.

"Truth is, you're shaping up to be a regular Hu Xin tragedy. And I'm not sure that's something I can allow in my niece's life, regardless of her wishes." He scrutinized Zuko as if the latter were a disobedient prisoner. "So I'd _suggest_ you make amends, and right quick."

"That's why I'm here," Zuko insisted with a sharp gesture at himself, impatient with the warden's threats.

"Well then, don't let me keep you." Tsutomu smiled coldly, and stepped back with an arm held out to indicate his way. "You'll find Mai in her sitting room. She put the boy down for a nap a few minutes ago."

He turned to leave with hands clasped behind his back, but Zuko stopped him on a sudden impulse. "Wait," he said hesitantly, and Mai's uncle turned to regard him. "Mai's parents — do they know?"

"You think she would confide in _them?_" the warden questioned coldly. "They still think you fucked that waterbender."

"_Katara?_" Zuko gaped, too shocked even to take offense at his language. "Why —"

"Well, let's see. Your wife leaves you, and next day a nubile little savage shows up on her doorstep, wanting to talk." His thin brows forked with contempt. "They won't be the last ones to think so either, if you don't learn to keep your friends in line."

Zuko could only stare at him, sick with the realization that Mai's parents suspected he cheated on her, even if they didn't know with whom. And they still treated Zuko better than their daughter.

"You and I both know it wouldn't matter who it was," the warden added darkly, as if reading his thoughts. "Oh, they might be surprised to learn you broke the law of gods and _men_ and not just your vows, but they would still tell her the same thing. That this is what she can expect from a **noble** husband, and it's not her place to question to it. She should put her son's future and her family's advancement over her own needs.

"I happen to think she deserves better," he concluded, lifting his sagging chin. "Unfortunately, she's stuck with you. So I'll say this once more, and be on my way." The warden walked right up to him, even though he had to look up to meet Zuko's eyes.

"Be the man that she deserves," he warned, holding his gaze. "Or I'll make you wish you had."

Zuko looked away first, scowling. And he walked down the hall hung with tapestries and accented with an intricate floor runner, when the warden took his leave with a brusque flame salute and the slamming of the door behind him.

He found Mai seated on the right side of the crimson couch in her sitting room, her back to him and white hands folded neatly in her lap. She was looking out the open windows on the palace when he entered, but watched in silence when Zuko walked around the couch and took a seat opposite her, before he could lose courage. The light caught her crown when she turned her head, and Zuko was glad to see she still wore it. She wouldn't if she meant to desert him, would she?

"Mai…" he said softly, longing to curl up with her on this couch like they did so many times before, back when she wore black and crimson instead of royal robes. "I had to see you," Zuko blurted, before he had time to consider his words. "I had to talk to — we need to talk."

She just watched him for a moment that might have as well have been a century, before Mai laid her hand on the cushion between them and leaned closer to reply, "It took you long enough."

And he remembered to breathe again, for the gesture — even small as it was — told him she would listen. "You _wanted_… ?" he said helplessly, leaning in to match her. "Then why did you leave?"

"You burned my bed," Mai reminded him, with something like impatience. "Where was I supposed to sleep?"

"We have — probably a _hundred_ guest rooms," Zuko sputtered in disbelief.

"And you couldn't be bothered to offer me one," Mai retorted with a cutting glare, withdrawing her hand. "Just because I keep quiet doesn't mean I _like_ being forgotten about."

"I never forgot you," he objected.

"Really?" Mai sprang like the jaws of a trap snapping closed. "So you were thinking of me the whole time you were with her?"

His eyes flew wide, surprised she would ambush him with that this early in a conversation. "Please don't —" he tried, before she cut him off.

"No." Mai shot to her feet and stalked to the windows, jerking the shutters closed to keep their conversation from the guards below. "You said you wanted to talk. Let's talk."

Zuko stood as well, and loosed a dart of flame to light a lamp that hung from the loft ceiling over his head and dispel the shuttered gloom. And Mai asked him, "Why did you do it?"

_She's asking this _now? he thought helplessly. "I don't know," Zuko insisted. "We were fighting, and things just — got out of hand."

"You've fought a lot of people, and didn't sleep with any of them." Mai pointed out coldly from across the coffee table, crossing her arms. "Try again."

"She **threatened** Lu Ten!" Zuko burst out, unaccountably angry that she wouldn't just accept his explanation. How could he explain something he didn't even understand? "She said things that — She tried to _kill_ me, alright?!" He indicated the cut beneath his eye that had unhelpfully vanished in the intervening weeks. "She was aiming for my throat when she gave me this!

"She made me so angry —" his words slowed in dread of what he was about to say, remembering all too well the last time he said it, "— I just lost control."

His wife watched him with hooded eyes for what felt like a long moment, before she finally said, "Okay," so grudgingly that he knew they weren't done with this. Not by a long shot. "Why did _she_ do it?"

"What?" Zuko gasped as if he'd taken a blow, but Mai was unaffected.

"It's a simple question," she urged, unnerving in her unblinking intensity. "You told me why you had you had sex with her. Why would she have sex with you?"

"I told you," Zuko whispered harshly, taking a few steps away when she approached, too threatened even to notice his retreat. "Our dad — he _abused_ her —"

No hint of expression flickered over her face. Mai remained as impassive as the first time he told her. "So what?" she demanded, let down her arms to close in until Zuko moved away. "She mistook you for him?"

"Maybe!" Zuko seized on the possibility in desperation. He began to find it hard to breathe, grabbing onto the table edge when he staggered past it. Why was she making him talk about this? "I don't —"

"But how do you know?" his wife pressed quickly, chasing him through the archway into her shuttered bedroom. "Did she call his name when you came inside her?" she volunteered without emotion, with only her unblinking glare to indicate she felt anything about it. How could she talk about — "Did she beg you to stop?"

"NO!" Zuko cried out in anguish, tears leaking from his eye and hands raised before him as if to ward off a blow, when he backed into one of her bedposts.

"Is that why you went to see Ozai?" she switched tacks so abruptly Zuko could practically feel his head spin. "Is that when he told you?"

"_No_," Zuko snapped, sidestepping into a defensive stance to put some space between them. "I went for help finding her, and he **blurted** it out!"

"He just volunteered this damning information?" Mai demanded, hands twitching irritably in her sleeves. "Just like that?"

"You didn't see his _face_ when I told him!" Zuko argued, insulted by her disbelief. "Or when he realized what he said — He just let it slip, in a moment of anger!"

"Really? Because that sounds a lot more like you." Zuko had just readied a retort when she stepped right up to him, and abandoned her icy composure to hiss, "You're a _fool_ if you think it ever happened."

Zuko backed up so quickly he bumped into the nightstand in his haste to retreat from her. "How can you _say_ that?" he whispered tearfully, heart thudding painfully in his ears.

"Because I know Azula, I know how she thinks," Mai insisted, thin fingers curling as if they longed to close around a knife. "She makes you feel **sorry** for her, you give her what she _wants_. You let her **bend** again when she starved herself, maybe you'll give her a _royal pardon_ when it turns out Daddy fu—"

His hand moved to strike her before Zuko even formed the intention, but Mai was faster, darting in to grab the back of his neck and press her mouth to his. His eyes sprang wide open, and he fell back when a rush of adrenaline broke over him like cold surf. But her other hand grabbed the sash at his waist to pull him close, her nails dug into his skin before he could break from her…

Zuko threw her on her bed and retreated to the archway, breathing hard while his heart hammered wildly. He shook his head against the wrongness of it. "What are you _doing?_" Zuko demanded, gone hoarse with shock, when she sat up. The flame headpiece had fallen from her hair, and her bun was coming loose down the back of her head.

"What Azula did," Mai replied with eyes wide and furious. His shadow fell over her from the light behind. "The only question is, why didn't you push _her_ away? Why didn't **you** make her stop?"

"I don't know," he said miserably, lips still smarting from her forceful kiss. Had she really just done that to make a point?

"I'll **tell** you," she spat, jumping to her feet so the light caught tears in her eyes. "Because it wasn't just adrenaline. It wasn't just the fight. You wanted _her_. You lusted after _her_. Your own sister."

"Mai, don't…"

"You act like you caught some disease that impaired your judgment!" she accused him, tucking her hands in trailing sleeves. "But people don't do what you did without feeling that way for a long time. And you never said a word to me."

"How was I _supposed_ to?" he broke at last, throwing an arm wide as if indicate the very possibility was fiction. "You would never talk about her! I had **no one **I could talk to about her —"

"So logical next step, raping your sister?"

"It wasn't **like** that!" he insisted, angry and more than a little frightened to have that accusation thrown at him again. "You weren't there, you don't know what it was like!"

"And what was it _like_, Zuko?" Her voice wavered dangerously, and Mai tore shaking hands from her sleeves to clench them at her sides. "You always liked to say how _crazy_ she was, like that excused what she did! Was that what you were thinking, when you **fucked** her three times?"

"_Stop it!_" Zuko grabbed her wrists to halt her in the midst of an obscene gesture, and his wife barked out a laugh that was half-deranged and half a sob. She didn't pull away, but Zuko almost released her in shock.

"If she was so crazy, how could she give consent?" Tears streamed freely down her face, and she swayed against his grip. "_What would you call that?_"

His throat closed with threatened tears, and Zuko let go of her with a panicked shake of his head. There was nothing he could say, but his reaction only seemed to set her off.

"You can't have it _both_ _ways!_" the cry tore from her throat as raw and wracking as a sob, and Mai shoved him hard with two hands to the chest to drive her ultimatum home. "So whose **fault **was it?" She chased Zuko when he stumbled. "Hers, or yours? _Hers_, or —"

He grabbed her in unthinking desperation, gathered her into his arms — but her rejection was immediate and total. "Get off, _get off!_" she shrilled, ducking his embrace to struggle free and push him away. Mai shoved him hard enough that she stumbled back into her bed. Her legs gave out to drop her on the edge of it, her hair falling in disarray about her shoulders. "I don't **want** you!"

"I'm _sorry!_" Zuko protested, empty arms falling uselessly at his sides. He couldn't see her hurt like this and not want to hold her. It just wasn't possible. "Do you want your uncle? I can get —"

"I want my _hus_band!" she keened long and low. "I want the man who would _never do this!_ I want the man I **trusted!**" Her voice broke, and his heart along with it. Mai bent double with arms wrapped around herself, as if her pain had taken physical form.

And he abandoned fear of humbling himself, in the face of a prospect far more terrifying. Zuko approached too swiftly for caution, descending to his knees. "Does —" he choked out with hands braced against the wood floor, halted just short of where she sat, "— does that mean — you won't come back?"

Mai tensed visibly, closed her eyes and sucked in a quick breath like he said something offensive. "I didn't say that," she spoke slowly at last.

And with four words, his life was spared.

Mai uncoiled and sat up straighter, loosing her arms to brace them against her knees. Her eyes fell just short of him, fixed on her hands when she whispered, "He asks for you every day." A tear dripped from her chin, and watching this, Zuko needed a moment to realize she was talking about their son. Her red-rimmed eyes fixed on his, as if recalling his attention to where it belonged. "He's too young to understand, and I don't — know what —"

"I'll talk to him —" Zuko volunteered immediately, reaching for her fingers.

Her other hand gripped his, trapping it between both of her own. A silent warning. "You'll talk to me first."

"I'll talk to you first," he echoed, squeezing her hand in affirmation. He felt her relax against his grip.

Mai took his other hand when he offered it, steadying herself against him when she eased from the edge of the bed to kneel opposite Zuko in the half-light from the sitting room. "If we're going to —" She stopped, grasped his hands tighter. "I have some conditions."

"Anything," Zuko said fervently, but she chastened him with a glance.

"Where are you sleeping?"

"My old room," he said quickly. "But the goldsmiths are crafting a new canopy, once we replace the bed —"

"I want my own chambers," she interrupted. If Mai noticed him droop in disappointment, she didn't remark it. "Fire Lady Ilah's should do. I understand they've been aired and dusted regularly since she died."

Zuko nodded mutely, though this was news to him. She drew a deep breath, and added, "You'll come to my rooms when I ask you specifically, and not until. When I want you, I'll find you."

"Okay," Zuko said quietly, expecting as much. Her hands were still warm within his. He would hold onto that for now.

"And…" Mai paused significantly, her eyes flinty and face grown hard as adamant. "You will apprise me of every detail of the search for Azula. If you keep anything you know from me…"

She didn't need to finish that threat. "I won't," he said solemnly. Mai nodded, and withdrew her hands from his. And Zuko looked on his wife in unstudied surprise.

"That's all?" he asked, amazed. In truth, he had expected much worse.

Mai didn't reply right away, but reached slowly up to trace his cheekbone where Azula cut a gash beneath his eye. Her thin fingers drew lower to just brush his lips. And for the first time in weeks, he felt something other than guilt. Zuko closed his eyes, hoping…

She whispered, "It's a start."

Mai rose sinuous as any dragon to her feet, and brushed past Zuko before he could realize she was gone. She left him to kneel in the light from without. His shadow fell over the bed where first she gave herself to him.

And it was symmetry.

* * *

His glider staff clicked nervously along the limestone floor, when Aang and Katara made their way down the lofty but austere halls of Bumi's palace in Omashu. Aang wished they were back on a happier pretext. It seemed like just yesterday they stopped here to visit. Maybe that was why his oldest friend didn't come to the roof to greet them and Appa upon their landing.

The briefly imprisoned Princess Azula might also have something to do with that.

Even north of the Kolau Mountains, as far as the small coastal town where they stopped the night before, the fugitive princess was all anyone could talk about. No two stories seemed to agree as to how she had been caught, or how she had escaped. No one knew what she was after, but that only fueled speculation.

All anyone knew was that she was in the Earth Kingdom, and continued to elude capture. It was enough to make people more than a little afraid, those that weren't deluded enough to chase the bounty on her head, anyway. Aang did his best to reassure them. He said the four nations were working together to return her to custody. (He tried not to dwell on the death sentence on her head.) And there was nowhere she could hide.

Except Aang wasn't sure that was strictly true. He and Katara had begun their search in the Fire Nation, and Aang could not but recall a few dozen village squares they visited in last three weeks, and the nationals assembled there at the grudging behest of their mayors or village elders.

Zuko's people looked, by and large, almost as ragged as the villagers at Jang Hui, if a good deal more healthy. And his and Katara's requests for information, even their promises to aid the search effort, were met with only hostile stares and sullen silence. His wife had grown so frustrated with their unhelpful attitude that she soundly harangued more than a few of the villagers, but her reproaches fell on deaf ears. Some even asked them to leave.

A few citizens proved more cooperative, but they seemed more cautious of Aang than anything. That was in some ways worse than the rejection. Aang remembered thinking there was something was really wrong here. He was the Avatar, and he'd had no idea of it.

He began to realize he was not these people's hero. He wondered if Azula might be. It was a disturbing thought.

Katara grew increasingly unhappy the longer they stayed in the Fire Nation, and he eventually managed to convince her it was her idea to search the Earth Kingdom instead. They avoided the colonies where Sokka and Toph decided to start looking, and focused their efforts on the southern continent. Omashu was one of the first stops they planned, even before they learned Azula had been held there.

One of Bumi's palace guards, clad in olive robes and _dai_, was sent to escort them to the audience chamber on their landing. Aang and Katara followed him inside the long hall with its high windows streaming sunlight, vaulted ceiling, and slender banners, to find the King of Omashu seated on his throne before the giant ankh that dominated the far wall.

Upon their approach, Bumi broke off dictating a letter to a put-upon scribe who had set up a table at the foot his dais, and stood to greet them instead. The plumes in his cap twitched like rabaroo ears. "Aang!" he spoke in the nasal drawl that sounded only slightly more brittle at one hundred and seventeen than it had at twelve. "And Katara! Back so soon? Did you forget your toothbrushes again?" He wagged a wizened finger at them, and Aang couldn't help grinning.

"Your Majesty," the scribe interjected a little desperately, raising sunken eyes from his letter to recapture the mad king's attention. "Ba Sing Se is most insistent —"

"Yes, yes, make the usual noises of apology," Bumi waved him off unconcernedly. "You've been here four years" — Aang heard the sallow scribe mutter "ten" under his breath — "I'm sure you know what to do."

Elevated from such humble beginnings, the aged king had never learned to read or write, and still steadfastly refused despite Aang's repeated offers to teach him. Bumi seemed to think living in excess of a hundred years entitled him to prove as unyielding as his element. And Aang could hardly argue with him there. The man was a trial to the scribes he relied on for correspondence though. Aang watched this one pack away his writing implements with something akin to sympathy, but Bumi had other concerns.

"So Aang," he continued as if they had not been interrupted, descending the shallow steps to throw an arm around the airbender. Aang was taller than Bumi now, hardly remarkable given his stoop, and his sinewy arm slipped from Aang's shoulders almost as quickly. "We haven't wanted for company since you left," he confided with a snort of laughter. "You will have heard you just missed your old enemy, the princess … and, as it turns out, a most entertaining dinner guest!"

Aang blinked at the aside, but Katara gaped openly. "You shared table with _Princess Azula?_" she demanded in disbelief. "Wasn't she supposed to be your prisoner?"

"So were you once, dear," Bumi reminded her fondly, his two-tone eyes misting at the recollection. "But that didn't stop me showing you hospitality, did it? Poor girl looked like she could use a square meal, positively peaky! It's the little things that count, you know, Aang," he said, ponderously stroking his white tuft of beard. "Never forget that."

"I think she means you're lucky, Bumi," Aang ignored his advice to point out the obvious. "Azula could have burned you to a crisp. Haven't you heard she's crazy now?"

"Nonsense, people say the same thing about me, and I'm saner than a Fire Sage!" the mad king dismissed with a gesture of his ring-bedecked hand. "Besides, she wasn't going to try anything surrounded by earthbendining guards who only wanted an excuse to grind her into dust — and me, of course." He cheerfully indicated himself.

"I don't know, if you made her angry enough…" Katara let the thought hang but crossed her arms, probably recalling the last Agni Kai. Aang cringed a little, wishing he could have been there for her sake.

"Oh, all Fire Nation people are like that," Bumi said with a reedy chuckle. "Except maybe that General of the West —"

"Dragon," Aang correctly patiently, wondering how Iroh fared in his search. He had sent word of his departure from the palace a few days ago.

"Yes, that was it!" Bumi clapped his veined hands as if delighted. "She had the most amusing twitch of her eyebrows, when I started to annoy her," he switched back to the subject of Azula so abruptly Aang almost lost the thread of his conversation. "But other than that, she was cooler than a sea cucumber! Hard to believe she's sister to that hot-headed prince you run around with, even if they look a bit alike."

"He's Fire Lord now, Bumi," Aang said gently, a tightness in his chest at the worry he didn't dare voice. "Don't you remember?"

"Of course, Aang," the old king reassured him, reading his concern in the furrow of his brows, in the way Aang gripped his glider staff tighter as if wanting to take flight. (He did.) Bumi's grin turned a little less toothy, and he spread his spotted hands in apology. "Forgive me, an old man — My mind wanders sometimes. It is good to see you again," he added almost to himself. "Old friends never tire of each other's company, do they?"

Katara's hand slipped into his, and Aang felt a little better at the reminder of his wife standing beside him. She spoke for the airbender when Aang looked away, blinking hard. "We wondered what you could tell us about Azula's capture. How did your people find her? How did she escape?"

Bumi sighed as if aggrieved to be getting back to business, and climbed the steps of his dais to resume his seat on the throne. He steepled his fingers before he replied, "Customs officers found her stowed away in a caravan headed south through the mountains," he said clearly, all trace of humor vanished. "It seems she squirreled herself away among the cargo, but fell asleep and was caught unawares by an inspection."

"Azula," Aang said slowly, disbelieving, "fell _asleep?_"

Bumi just shrugged bent shoulders. "I told you she was peaky," he reminded the airbender. "She must have caught a bad bug. She wasn't with us long, but her guards reported she vomited several times. Even after dinner, and it was some excellent fare! Why, I'd even say it was fit for a princess!" He snorted with laughter, and Aang smiled weakly. "Though I guess her stomach disagreed. If there's one thing I love about this job besides the personal petting zoo, it would have to be the food…"

Katara, realizing as readily as Aang now when the mad king was launching into a tangent, recalled his attention to the matter at hand. "And how long was Azula here? How did she escape?"

"Ah yes, I was just getting to that," Bumi replied, as unperturbed as ever at breaches of protocol like her interruption. "Customs didn't recognize her at first, and she didn't bend fire. Probably hoped to escape undetected at the first opportunity. But it turned out she had the bad luck to stow away among goods bound for the palace and my personal use. When she was brought before me for judgment, my guards remembered her and, of course, I did too. I never forget a face, even if I forget names and dates and titles sometimes.

"She was with us for two days, all told. And as to how she escaped, I let her go."

Aang blinked. It took a moment for Bumi's casual revelation to register, and he looked around a little nervously to see that Bumi's guards had left them alone in the throne room, departing unnoticed at the some signal from their king.

Katara was quicker to react. "You _what?_" she gasped, as if his audacity took her breath away. "How could you do that?" she demanded, disbelief quickly giving way to clenchfisted anger. And Aang knew that he had, because Bumi still wasn't smiling. "Don't you realize what a **threat** she is? To peace, to Aang, to — to _everything_ —"

Bumi raised a hand to forestall her, and interrupted with a solemnity quite unusual to him, "I do, young friend." His two-tone eyes considered them both seriously. "I may know even better than you. But right now, I'm less concerned with what she might be plotting, and more concerned with what she might accomplish as a symbol."

"And what is that?" Aang asked slowly when Katara fell silent, seething. He felt as if the words came from somewhere outside of him, vaguely surreal.

Bumi looked hard at him, and replied only, "War."

Aang sucked in a quick breath. That word would still prove as hateful forty years from Ozai's defeat as at four. And Bumi explained, "Before the princess was captured, we hosted a delegation on their way back to Ba Sing Se from the Fire Nation. It seems your friend the Fire Lord has threatened war if his sister is executed."

"What?!" Katara demanded in shock, at the same time as Aang said, "No way!"

"He wouldn't do that!" the waterbender insisted, shaking her head once for emphasis. "It has to be an exaggeration."

"Zuko is just as committed to peace as any of us," Aang seconded. "He wouldn't endanger that for personal concerns." But Katara looked suddenly doubtful, biting her lip.

Bumi just sighed, leaning back on his throne to stroke his white tuft of beard. "Left that part out, did he? Well, that's not surprising. It hardly paints him in a flattering light, does it? I don't doubt it happened though," he added almost as an afterthought, gripping the arms of his throne to shift position in his seat. "How has all the vivid imagination of slab of granite. He wouldn't make something like that up."

"Even if that's true," and Aang still didn't want to believe it, not about one of his closest friends, "why would you set Azula free? Why not turn her over to us, or give her to Zuko?"

"Because, Aang," Bumi said a little wearily, "your firebending friend is only half the problem. The other half is my own kingdom."

"You'd have to turn her over to Ba Sing Se, if they got word you captured Azula," Katara realized. Her eyes grew round as ripples on a pond at the understanding.

She left unsaid that it would be Bumi's people who suffered reprisals if Ba Sing Se ever thought he turned the princess over to the Fire Nation. But Aang knew they were all considering it, from the silence that settled heavy and suffocating as a wet blanket over the three.

A brief smile tugged at his cracked lips, before Bumi confirmed, "You have the right of it, dear. The princess is a sore point for leadership in Ba Sing Se, and a lot of vassal lords have supported them in calling for her execution."

"Wait a minute." Aang was confused. "If you knew she'd be sentenced to death, why didn't you say anything?" This was the kind of advance warning it would have been really nice to have.

Bumi raised a finger and his unruly eyebrows to reply, "Because I _didn't_ know, of course!" He chuckled darkly at the confusion that was clearly evident on Aang's face. "When I helped free Ba Sing Se, they learned I was part of the Order of the White Lotus. Since then, I've found myself cut off from most privileged information.

"But when you've lived as long as I have, you won't be surprised how much of plans emerge, when they're already set in motion," he said casually, spreading his hands as if in apology. "If I'm finding this out now, you can bet it's because the lords and generals and petty kings think nothing can stop them. Not me, nor the whole of the Order."

"But is that true?" Katara demanded. "Are they _that _sure they'll catch Azula, and kill her?"

"What they're sure of is they'll benefit either way," Bumi explained patiently. "If they take that girl's head off, it will go a long way toward undoing her triumphs, and restoring Earth Kingdom honor. On the other hand," he held out his other hand palm up, "if her loving brother finds her first and won't hand her over — Well then, he's broken faith. And my countrymen will have all the excuse they need for war, the quicker to recover their losses from a hundred years of occupation.

"Your friend the Fire Lord left them few other options, when he suspended reparations to the Earth Kingdom."

Katara gripped his hand, hard. Aang exchanged a worried glance with her, but neither of them tried to contradict the mad king. Katara had a sibling too, and she at least seemed willing to believe Zuko might go that far at a threat to his sister. His state of mind on their last visit to the palace would point toward this, Aang had to concede. And Zuko had been dissatisfied with the reparations system for a long time.

But that didn't mean Aang had to like this any better. Or the fact that Zuko didn't see fit to tell them.

"And if Azula stays at large?" Aang put forth quietly, trying to understand why Bumi did this.

The old earthbender shook his balding head. "The princess becomes a rallying point for a lot of factions unhappy with the Fire Nation, and they express that unhappiness more effectively in large numbers. The colonies are as much of a tinderbox now as they were four years ago," he spoke wearily. "Even this far South, we know that. One spark is all it would take to ignite conflict again."

"But that can't be true!" Katara objected a little desperately, letting go of Aang's hand to step forward and argue the point. "They'd be fools to try it, Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation both!" she insisted, looking from Aang to Bumi. "Aang is a fully realized Avatar, they _have_ to know he'd stop them."

Aang nodded agreement, but Bumi was undeterred. "And does the Avatar State let you be in fifty places at once, Aang?" he questioned, moving to stand. "Make no mistake," Bumi wagged a wizened finger down at him, and there was nothing remotely funny about it this time, "a war with the Earth Kingdom would be a whole different animal than the war with the Fire Nation. You can't just depose Kuei, if he's even behind this, and end the war in one fell blow.

"We're not a unified government. We're a loose confederacy of states with more heads than a hydra," Bumi explained, showcasing the keen judgment that had secured his throne for decades. "A continent this vast supplies almost unlimited troops, and plenty of places to hide private armies. And our chain of command is more convoluted than the 52nd Earth King's family tree.

"Plausible deniability," he added helpfully, when Aang furrowed his brows. "You can stop one warlord or two or two dozen, and the Council of Five will still claim they had nothing to do with these insurrections. But should the Fire Nation decide to fight back, I think you'll find they change their helpless tune.

"There was a time the Fire Nation took advantage of our divisions," Bumi mused, as if unconscious of the horrified stares both Aang and Katara directed at him. "With the edge in technology and superior communications, they brought our continent to its knees. But this princess has become a focal point for all the resentment the Earth Kingdom bears her country," the old king explained, descending the shallow steps of his dais.

"And four years of your friend's open-handed reign have done much to level the playing field. Most parts of the Earth Kingdom have begun using carrier pigeons similar to the Fire Nation's messenger hawks. And post-war treaties and trade agreements included access to Fire Nation technologies. They made the Fire Lord dismantle the war machine and demobilize his troops. Even if he started to build back up today…"

Bumi let the thought hang. He didn't need to finish it.

Aang felt Katara's arm slip around him when she pressed to his side. "I can't believe this," she whispered looking up at him, her blue eyes bright with tears. "Everything we fought for…"

Aang hugged her back with his free arm, and looked to his oldest friend. "It's like every choice is the wrong one," he glumly agreed.

But Bumi smiled then, not his usual toothy grin but something more understated. "There's some worse than others," he reminded Aang where he stood before him in lime-tinged crystal light. "For the princess to fall into either country's hands would force the issue. But so long as she's unaccounted for, you have time. Not _much_ time," he cautioned, "but **some**."

The old king formed an open circle with the husband and wife, when he reached out to grasp the hand that held Aang's glider staff. "You can't approach this head-on," he advised. "This is a problem for an airbender. You have to find a way around these obstacles. Find the path that no one else can see, that only you can sense on the winds. Consult your past lives. Find a way out of this hole we've dug ourselves into," he sighed, let his hand drop.

"I have friends in all four nations, just like you. I'm an old man, and don't want to see another war in my lifetime. But if anyone can find a way to stop this, it's _you_, Aang," he said.

His two-tone eyes gleamed warmly when he looked on the airbender. "I only wish I could have warned you sooner. But I'm afraid my mind isn't what it used to be…"

"You've already done so much for us," Katara reassured him, when Aang was too overwhelmed to make reply. When he felt suddenly alone even with his wife and his oldest friend standing to either side of him.

"Even if it was an ugly truth, it's one we needed to hear," she added, and looked up at Aang who pressed his lips into a hard line and nodded. "We'll take your words to heart." Katara promised.

Bumi had just opened his mouth to reply when two young couriers ran in through the far archway, nearly racing each other to the throne.

"Your Majesty!" one exclaimed, descending to one knee to offer a scroll to the illiterate king. At the same time, her shorter companion arrived panting behind her, kneeling before the three who turned to face him with a hasty greeting of "King Bumi, honored Avatar, Master Katara!"

"This message just arrived from Kyoshi Island," the first courier put in, but Bumi only gestured to Aang.

"Would you do the honors?" the old king asked. Aang shrugged a little irritably and retrieved the scroll from the kneeling courier who climbed to her feet with a bow. She moved to stand to the side of the throne and await his reply.

"This scroll came from the Fire Nation palace for Avatar Aang and Master Katara," the second courier added, and Katara took the scroll from him and began to read while Aang looked over Bumi's missive. The king began to hum snatches of what sounded like several different tunes in just the time it took Aang to read the message.

"This is bad," Aang announced, and his wife looked up from her own letter in question. "Azula showed up on the island, and fought the Kyoshi Warriors," he filled in Bumi and Katara, while the two couriers stood politely to the side, pretending not to listen. "None of the warriors have lasting injuries, but Azula escaped and torched the piers at the North port while she was at it. They tried to follow her, but a bad storm blew up from the South, and they lost her. They think their first bird got lost in the storm, too. This is the second letter they've sent."

"Ty Lee," Katara guessed immediately, touching the tips of her fingers to her temple as if in amazement at the oversight. "We should have known she would try to recruit her. She's the only friend Azula has left."

_Not that she had many to begin with_, Aang thought. "Ty Lee didn't join her though," he pointed out, remembering the acrobat had been incapacitated along with the rest of her squad. "I guess that's a victory for us, however small."

Bumi nodded sagely. "I sent a bird to Kyoshi Island after the princess escaped," Aang glanced to the silent couriers, who gave no sign that they heard let alone questioned the old king's story. "But it seems forewarned was not forearmed," he finished regretfully.

"What did Zuko have to say?" Aang asked. His own voice sounded strange to his ears, and Katara looked twice at him before she replied.

"I guess his bird wasn't lost in the storm, because he knows about Kyoshi. He says he'll take an airship there in person to apologize, and provide supplies and labor to repair the damage done," Katara read aloud, holding the scroll out so Aang could glance at it over her shoulder. "He says we should focus our search on the southern coast of the Earth Kingdom and in-land. He wants to question the Kyoshi Warriors himself, and asks us not to waste the trip."

"Okay…" Aang said slowly, rubbing his tattooed forehead with the heel of one hand. That sounded reasonable enough, he guessed.

And Aang grit his teeth. He hated this. He hated feeling like he might not be able to trust his friend. He hated that circumstances might put them at odds again. He hated —

His wife's fingers closed over his hand and eased it away from his head. Katara looked up at him with the depth of understanding he had only ever known from her. It illuminated her dusky face like moonlight on still water.

Her eyes seemed to say, _We have time_. Her mouth spoke, "We're in this together."

Aang pressed a kiss to her smooth brow. And the silent prayer he offered then was not for guidance, but given in thanks.

* * *

A plainly dressed Zuko climbed the steep dirt trail alone, past the training dojo whose lights shone cheerfully out into the creeping dark. It had taken the better part of the afternoon to arrange the transfer of supplies from his airship and the duties of carpenters, craftspersons, and laborers he had brought to Kyoshi Island to clean up after his sister. Sunlight tinged a bloody orange cast a long, faint shadow behind the _torii_ gate he entered, on his way to speak with the only warrior who didn't come out to greet him.

"She's on Shrine duty," their temporary leader, a girl named Kaede, had explained uncomfortably when he asked for Ty Lee. "She's been kind of quiet — you know, for her — ever since she had to fight the princess. I thought I would give her some light work, until she's back to her old self."

Zuko had merely nodded, careful to conceal his misgivings. He would have said once that a quiet Ty Lee was a sign of impending apocalypse, but now he had an awful suspicion just what had thrown her so badly…

Ty Lee didn't hear him climb the stone steps to the Kyoshi Shrine or the wood ones, engrossed as she was in her efforts to light the ceiling lamp hanging just inside the open archway. "_Shoot!_" he heard her mutter angrily, straining on tiptoes to hold a lit ceremonial candle to the coals in the small pan at the bottom of the lamp. Either it was too short or she was, because the acrobat couldn't quite reach.

"Ty Lee," he greeted her from the darkened porch, and she about jumped out of her skin.

"Zuko!" She dropped the candle to the tatami mat that ran the length of the room, and squealed "Oh no!" when fire licked at the woven straw.

Zuko caught the tiny flame up with a gesture like cupped water, and redirected it to the coal pan, casting the entranceway in a warm golden glow when the lamp lit. The bust of Kyoshi that dominated the center of the room and the artifacts displayed along the walls cast shadows about the windowless interior. A colorful mural on the wall opposite, muted by the dark, depicted the Avatar speaking to her people beside sea and shrine.

Ty Lee breathed relief at the crisis averted and looked about to thank him. But her smile fell when she met his gaze, and the painted acrobat looked down instead. She rubbed at the smudge on the mat with the toe of her boot, while the smoking candle rolled to a stop.

And Zuko sighed. "You weren't at the docks today," he observed, in what he hoped was a neutral tone.

Ty Lee looked up a little guiltily, and said, "I didn't think you'd want to see me."

Zuko winced a little at that, recalling their argument of more than a month ago. "Why not?" he tried for a lighter tone, hoping to put her more at ease. "We're friends, aren't we?"

She watched him uncertainly from beneath long eyelashes, her arms creeping around herself in an almost protective gesture. "I thought so…" she sadly replied, and Zuko grimaced.

_I guess I deserve that_, he thought. He said instead, "I've had some time to think, and … I may have been unfair to you." Ty Lee looked up in surprise, and let down her arms. "I guess I shouldn't blame you for — for being Azula's friend. Even if I don't understand it." This was the wrong thing to say. He could tell by the look on her face and tried to smooth it over with, "I'm sorry."

And Ty Lee bent to retrieve the green candle, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like, "It's not _me_ you need to be sorry to."

"What was that?" he demanded softly, irritation creeping in despite his best efforts at civility.

Ty Lee looked him full in the face, her scowl and the set of her brows spoke defiance. "I _said_, it's not **me** you need to be sorry to! Azula's in a lot of trouble!" she burst out before Zuko could reply, foisting the candle off on a carved wood table near the archway to plant hands on her hips. "And you maybe could've prevented all this if you just **talked** her!"

Zuko had had enough, besides her accusations confirming what he already guessed. "The other warriors seem to think they spotted Azula before she could meet you," he put forth quietly, ignoring her reproach. "But they're wrong, aren't they?"

She faltered in sudden apprehension, and Zuko regretted having to trot this out. It made him feel as underhanded as his sister. "I didn't say anything," he reassured, and Ty Lee bit her lip in the lamplight, clearly torn whether to thank him or not. "I just —" He struggled to think how to put this. "Your friends told me what they saw of Azula and — I need some information."

Ty Lee looked strangely at him, and Zuko realized this was the closest to permission he was going to get. "Why was she crying?" he said tightly, wondering if this was some fresh hurt or the one he had done to her. "What — what did she tell you?"

"That's none of your business, it's _personal!_" Ty Lee retorted, looking as offended as if Zuko had pried into her own secrets. "Good friends keep each other's confidence."

"Ty Lee, I'm just trying to help her —"

"No, you're **not!**" she contradicted, so fiercely Zuko withdrew in surprise and Ty Lee walked fast out the archway and down the steps outside. "You're just trying to help _yourself!_ She never would have ran if she thought there was any chance of you ever letting her out!

"But you never saw her; you wouldn't even answer her letters!" Ty Lee continued as if he were standing right in front of her and not practically chasing her to the edge of the pines that bordered the stone path. Angry tears welled in her eyes in the twilight. Zuko just glimpsed them when he tried to get around her and arrest her progress. "Even I could tell you just dropped her there to **forget **about her —"

"I _never_ forgot!" Zuko shouted, his voice breaking when he grabbed her elbow to turn her about. But Ty Lee just shook her head, almost sadly.

"You never helped her, either," the acrobat spoke quietly. "I know she didn't always treat you right. I know, because she hurt me too." She indicated herself with a hand over her heart. "But that's not all she was. She's **not** a monster," Ty Lee insisted. "She feels remorse, and she can repay kindness with kindness. She's just — seen so little of that, I don't know if she knows what it looks like anymore."

"That's —" Zuko started to say, but didn't get a chance to finish when he caught motion out of the corner of his eye. Before he could react or give any word of warning, a thick, ropy tongue lashed out to strike the back of Ty Lee's neck — followed shortly by the ingress of a giant, mole-like creature into the clearing from the cover of the trees. He took up a defensive stance, but Ty Lee collapsed beside him with a cry of alarm, when the paralyzing toxins did their work.

And Zuko was left with no doubt just who — and what — he was dealing with. He knew of only one bounty hunter with a trained shirsu like the one that clawed the ground before him, its tongue flicking the air. Even if another rider sat behind her in the saddle, his features indistinct in the growing dark. Even if she looked just as surprised to see him as he was to see her. Her skull headpiece gleamed white as Ty Lee's frightened face when she looked down at him.

And he whispered, "_June?_"


	14. Two Birds

**Another chapter, and only a month and a half this time. Improvement? Well, we'll call it that. Need to get better about updating more often, but unfortunately(?) ... life. Job. Responsibilities in general. Why are kids so desperate to grow up again?**

**But seriously, I'm happy with the response last chapter, and thanks for your feedback! Regarding questions... Although it would make more sense to spell her name as "Jun," Avatar wiki informs me our favorite bounty hunter is listed as "June" in the episode credits. And it's kind of my go-to source for info I need, beyond watching the episodes I need over again. Sorry if it bothers any readers, but I wanted to be true to the source, even in small things like this.**

**I've read "In the Madhouse," and enjoyed it very much. Thanks for the comparison, though I hope you will find more good quality stories soon. Always a bummer when there's a dearth of good fanfic...**

**That Azula's abuse at her father's hands went unaddressed had as much to do with who she was and how she acted as it did with Ozai's position as Fire Lord. We know she wasn't popular with the servants, who would be the only ones (besides Ozai, the complicit Li and Lo, and maybe royal tutors) to see her on a regular basis. She also had (and has) the kind of personality that does not invite help or is likely accept it if offered. (This was what Rai meant, when she said Azula was "a piece of work.") We have also seen how Ozai swore her to secrecy, and continually reinforced the need for this as training for her future position.**

**Lack of response to the abuse was not inevitable, but there was certainly a lot working against any effort to stop it. And we saw that it didn't stop until outside circumstances removed Azula from the situation anyway.**

**Iroh has been living in Ba Sing Se the past four years under the false name Mushi, which Zuko gave him in their time as fugitives. We saw last chapter that he also uses this as a kind of code name in his work for the Order of the White Lotus...**

**Again, thanks so much for your comments and questions, and words of encouragement. Special thanks as well to Meneldur, whose input on something like half this chapter was invaluable as always. I hope you and all my readers enjoy this installment, and that you will leave a review!**

**Happy reading.**

* * *

"June!" Zuko shouted in reproach, when he had to leap back to avoid the same tongue-lashing Ty Lee got, courtesy of her snarling shirsu.

"_What the hell?_" they demanded at the same time, while June yanked hard on her shirsu's reins to halt it … him? Zuko seemed to recall it was a him.

"Nyla, _stop!_" she yelled, flicking her whip with a crack that split the still twilit air. "This isn't your target!" The shirsu's snarl subsided to a mutinous rumble, and he turned in a circle before sitting on his haunches. The man behind June was nearly unseated, and grabbed her round the waist before she shoved him off.

"What happened?" Ty Lee cried plaintively, finally audible now the commotion had died down. Zuko glanced over at her crumpled form with a twinge of guilt. He almost forgot she was there. "What did you — Why can't I move?" she demanded, gray eyes wide and terrified. "Did it _chi_ block me?"

"It's shirsu venom, you _twit_," June snapped, pulling on the reins to urge the shirsu back to his feet. "It'll wear off in an hour, and you can move freely. I'm not here for you anyway."

"What treachery is this?" the other rider demanded, slipping from the saddle to the lush grass to seize Nyla's reins in three quick strides. His feet were bare. He shot a glare at Zuko from under a mop of raggedly cropped hair, before he had to duck to avoid the shirsu's barbed tongue. June patted the beast's head to ease it, scowling.

"If I wanted **his** whereabouts, I could ask his _court chamberlain!_" the man insisted angrily, a gust of wind off the water stirring the frayed and faded black of his robe when he gestured to Zuko. "I didn't hire you to find the wrong sibling!"

Zuko sucked in a quick breath when this clue finally placed his origins. Ba Sing Se. The Dai Li were hunting his sister, and they enlisted June and her shirsu to their cause.

"You're chasing _Azula?_" Ty Lee squeaked in indignation, her voice muffled from having half her painted face pressed into the grass. "Why can't you just leave her alone?"

"You didn't _hire_ me at all, you bastard!" June retorted bitterly, ignoring them both to tug the reins from his grip. "And Nyla just follows the **scent!** It's not his fault or _mine_ if you gave him the wrong sample!"

"This dumb beast sniffed around every corner of the Fire Lord's _airship!_" the Dai Li argued, producing a bundle of red silk from his pocket that unfolded in his grip to reveal intricate gold trim. The sight of it was like a punch to the gut, even six weeks later. His mother's robe, the robe Azula wore that night. How —

The Dai Li brandished the robe at June and continued, oblivious to his upset, "Why would his _scent_ be on her —"

He stopped and stared at Zuko, his rock-like features gone slack with surprise. And Zuko could practically see him put the pieces together, when his green eyes narrowed keenly and his mouth formed a hard smile.

He could only imagine this was the same Dai Li who collected the robe. If he had seen the beach house, Ursa's bedroom…

"Well, imagine that," the man said slowly, licking his lips. He backed away from both June and Zuko to take a step closer to the shadow of the trees. "Two birds, one stone."

"What the _hell_ are you on about?" June shouted from atop her shirsu, too strident and high-strung even for her. "I fulfilled my end of the bargain, now I **want** what you promised!"

"You certainly haven't," the Dai Li calmly replied, glancing at her in the falling dark while he kept one eye on Zuko. "Not 'til you deliver the princess to us. Her brother is merely an unexpected bonus," he added. "But who knows? With the value of this information, our director may even consider _paying_ you."

"You know it's not **gold** I want, you smug son of bitch —"

"And I'm the only one who can _give_ you what you want," the Dai Li sharply rejoined, focusing his full attention on June as Zuko tensed in readiness to act. Just what he planned to do was less certain. "So I'd suggest you keep that foul mouth **shut** until I ask for your input —"

"What is he _talking_ about?" Ty Lee piped up urgently from where she still lay boneless on the ground behind him, and Zuko deflated in frustration. Of all the people to witness this. "Zuko, I don't understand…"

He shushed her with a silent gesture to demand of the Dai Li, "Where did you get that?"

It was a stupid question. He knew it as soon the words left his mouth, and apparently the other man thought the same. "I think you know exactly where I got it," he spoke condescendingly, taking another step back as if to ease the tension of the moment. "And I think you'll call off your search and not interfere with ours… unless you want everyone to know your secret."

"_What_ secret?" Ty Lee demanded, with the perfectly inconvenient timing Zuko should expect from her by now. "Guys, can't you just —"

But the Dai Li opened his mouth to interrupt, and something gave in Zuko. All his rage and resentment were called forth in flame, and brought to bear on the filth who would take his sister's head and try to blackmail him in the bargain…

His fire cut through the twilit gloom as swift as any fork of lightning, but the Dai Li moved faster, letting the robe fall from his grip and burn to ashes in the flames, when he dropped into a horse stance. A rock wall burst from the ground with the lifting of his hands to shield him. And it was this same rock wall that came hurtling toward Zuko when he lifted his attack, at a flurry of curses from June.

Zuko dodged, but was alerted by Ty Lee's scream that she lay in the line of attack. "Ty Lee!" he cried urgently, even as Zuko ran back to yank her by the arms from where the rock wall collapsed a split second later, falling forward to crush the spot where she had lain paralyzed. Zuko pulled so hard he fell over backward, dragging Ty Lee partly on top of him. Her round eye lined in red face paint stared up at him from somewhere near his chin, one shining iris trembling with palpable fear.

The lash of Nyla's tongue and the crack of June's whip both sounded in quick succession before they even hit the ground, but Zuko knew neither attack succeeded when the shirsu uttered a cry of distress that fell somewhere between a scream and a hiss. The ground shifted to throw Nyla from his feet and June from her saddle. Zuko pushed a shaking Ty Lee off of him and sat up to find the shirsu scrabbling at the dirt with long claws to recover its footing. The Dai Li was nowhere to be seen. And June —

"You fucking **goon!** What's _wrong_ with you?!" She grabbed Zuko by the topknot and punctuated her demands with two swift slaps to the face, before he tore free of her grip and scrambled to his knees and then his feet on the singed grass, his hair falling in disarray and head still ringing from her blows.

"What —"

"He'll think we're _working together_, you **idiot!** And he'll _report_ to his superiors the **first** chance he gets!" June practically screamed at him, something that sounded unbelievably like tears in her low voice when she bent to snatch up her whip from where she dropped it to assail Zuko. He took a few steps back, having no desire to feel its sting firsthand.

But June was not deterred, and marched right up to Zuko to grab hold of the crossed collar of his shirt, brown eyes smoldering as hot as any firebender's. "I swear by every **god** you worship, if they hurt him, I'll kill you _myself!_"

"Hurt _who?_" Ty Lee asked uncomfortably, from where she still lay paralyzed and half-bent in the grass.

June paid her no mind but glared at Zuko instead, when she bit out, "My _father_."

"You have a father?" Zuko blurted the first thought that came to his mind, and June let go of the front of his shirt in disgust.

"No, I was raised by shirsus, _Genius_," was her caustic reply, when June fastened the whip to her belt. "Of course I have a father. Though thanks to your idiocy, how much longer I will is debatable," she added bitterly over her shoulder, jumping back into the saddle when her beast knelt to let her mount and then climbed back to his feet.

"The Dai Li kidnapped him to make you find Azula?" Zuko pressed, drawing closer despite Nyla's warning growl. It seemed the shirsu was attuned to June's mood, when the bounty hunter scowled down at him with an aspect no friendlier than his.

"Well, aren't you a quick one?" she sneered, reaching for the reins. "No wonder they put you in charge of a country —"

"What will you do now?" Zuko demanded, ignoring her insults and grabbing the reins to prevent her exit. Nyla flicked his tongue idly at the Fire Lord who ducked to the side, and June struck the beast sharply on the back of his blunt head.

"Hope they don't kill my dad," she snapped in reply, with a death-glare that said Zuko had better hope so too. "Find your damn sister. Make the exchange."

"No!" Ty Lee pleaded tearfully, her shining eyes fixed on June while her rest of her lay paralyzed. "You can't do that! They'll **kill** her!"

The bounty hunter spared her a dismissive glance. "I missed the part where that's my problem."

"What if we captured this guy instead?" Zuko said quickly, considering what the Dai Li discovered. "We could track him down before he contacts his superiors."

June's glare became more calculating when she considered him, yanking the reins from his grasp. "_We?_" she repeated. "You proposing a partnership, Bright Boy?"

"Neither of us wants him to tell what he knows," Zuko observed, lowering his voice to try to prevent Ty Lee from overhearing.

"Just one problem," June pointed out snidely, not bothering to speak softly in kind. "He makes regular reports. When he disappears, the rest of them know something's up," her hands gripped her reins tighter in the falling dark. "And they still have my father. You do the math."

"I can help you get him back!" he offered a little desperately, when June made as if to leave. This actually seemed to surprise her, and Zuko amended, "I'll help free your father, and — you'll track Azula for me instead."

"Deal," June replied, with a blink of her shadowed eyes. There was a guardedness to her expression that set Zuko on edge, but he didn't have time to debate her motives. He had to arrange a hasty departure.

"Ty Lee," he said urgently, striding over to where she lay when June slipped down from the shirsu's back and began to search one of her saddlebags for what he guessed was a sample of their quarry's scent. Zuko went down on one knee to scoop up the painted acrobat and carry her back up the steps to the Kyoshi Shrine. "Ty Lee, I need to ask you a favor —"

"No, Zuko! Don't do this!" Ty Lee pleaded, hanging from his arms as limply as a rag doll and barely able to look up at him from her awkward vantage point. "You can't —"

"I have to," he cut her off impatiently, crouching to deposit her on the wood porch. Zuko sat her up with her back against the wall, so she could at least see help coming for her, when it did. "I can't let June work for the Earth Kingdom. If they catch Azula, it's over for her."

"I _know_," Ty Lee insisted, her eyes fixed on him even though she couldn't turn her bowed head toward where he knelt in the lamplight spilling from the doorway. "I just mean don't chase her! Please Zuko, just leave her alone," she practically begged, startling him with the earnestness of her plea. "She doesn't want to see you."

He ignored the pang he felt at this, and what he really wanted to ask. Had she said that? Zuko spoke grimly instead, "I can't respect her wishes, Ty. Not with her life at stake. I have to find her first."

He raised a hand to forestall her when she made to argue the point. "And I need you to tell Mai where I've gone and what I'm doing." To preserve the fragile truce they had established, he added silently. Mai knew he had come here and why, but there was no way he could have planned for this side trip and no time to tell her himself.

"You have to go personally to the palace, return with my crew," Zuko pressed, still crouched across from her. "You can't put this in a letter; it's too likely to be intercepted. Tell her I'm working with June, the bounty hunter. I have to recover her kidnapped father, and she'll track Azula for me."

"Zuko —" Ty Lee started hesitantly, before June yelled over, "Let's get this show on the road!" She climbed back into her saddle, and Zuko turned a hard gaze on the acrobat.

"Repeat it back to me," he demanded, and Ty Lee swallowed.

"June the …"

"Bounty hunter," he repeated impatiently, when the woman in question shouted, "_C'mon_, cabbage slug!"

"You find her dad, she tracks down Azula," Ty Lee summarized dutifully, tears still shining in the light from the archway beside her. "Zuko —"

"Thank you," he said, standing quickly but stooping to squeeze her shoulder in gratitude. "And … I'm sorry about —" He gestured helplessly before realizing Ty Lee couldn't see it, because her head still hung and she couldn't raise her eyes to make out someone standing right above her. "I'm sorry."

"Just don't let anyone hurt her," Ty Lee spoke to the porch, her tears falling onto the folds of her skirt. "She's — She shouldn't be alone right now. I should have gone with her, I should've insisted!" she fretted when Zuko turned to leave, his heart heavy. "But she didn't tell me about her death sentence, she might not even _know_…"

June looked back, her heart-shaped face framed by a dark curtain of hair, when he climbed up behind her in the saddle. "If we hurry, we might catch him before he leaves the island," she spoke tersely. "Our arrival didn't go unnoticed, and he'll have to avoid your people if he wants to find a ride."

She didn't wait for his reply, and Zuko had to grab her round the waist to avoid being thrown off when she whipped the reins to urge her shirsu forward. Nyla tore up the long grass that blanketed the incline, to carry them into the deeper night that fell beneath the pines. And Zuko glanced back at Ty Lee, sitting abandoned on the porch before she vanished through the cover of the trees.

* * *

The lights of the valley town glittered below her like morning dew gathered in the crevice of a rock, when Azula stopped to rest near sunset. Like any firebender, her strength flagged a bit at evenfall, but the effect had become more pronounced with her pregnancy. And she scowled, considering the pitiful progress she had made up the coast since she washed up on shore a week ago.

The violent storm that blew up in her escape from Kyoshi Island had effectively crippled her pursuers, but also capsized Azula's stolen junk and nearly drowned her. She felt sick for reasons that had nothing to do with her condition, when she recalled the buzzing in her head and burning of lungs that cried out for air, when the waves pulled her under again and again…

Azula had blacked out at some point, and still had no idea how she ended up drenched and half-drowned on the sandy shore and not at the bottom of the sea. There was no trace of the boat, excepting a few shattered pieces of debris that littered the lonely stretch of sand. Her food and spare clothing, the gold she had from Rai, were all gone. She woke with her life and the clothes on her back, and the gnawing ache of hunger in her belly that she had since come to associate with the child Zuko got on her.

She didn't know how else to think of it yet. Mostly, she tried not to.

But the effects were hard to ignore, when she felt far heavier than her six weeks with fatigue. When she would seek the shelter of brush or rock outcroppings that hid her from view of the road, to shut her eyes for a few minutes and wake to find hours passed. She seemed to spend half her time sleeping, and sometimes she wondered if this was normal. Then she would remind herself that nothing about her circumstance was normal.

He was her brother. She would be lucky if it wasn't born with gills or extra limbs or some crippling deformity. _A more literal monster than I could ever hope to be_, Azula thought a little giddily, and lay back against the inclined slab of limestone she sat on with a laugh like a sob.

Her left hand ran up the plane of her stomach, still flat and toned as it had been since she trained herself back into fighting form in the asylum. She watched the sky bleed through half-closed eyes, as she considered it might not even be born. She might lose the baby. This early, and it might not even hurt, she told herself.

It might die. Wasn't that what happened to mistakes?

Azula had been trained in foraging, and didn't go without what food she could gather, even if the riverlands of the southern continent were too ordered and populous for her to risk theft very often. But she proved less adept at hunting, and her diet had become rather limited. The hunger was an ache that never truly went away.

She knew it wasn't getting what it needed. That any parasite denied sustenance would die. She could — she could starve it out…

"How can you think that about your own child?" spoke a mournful voice from much too close, and Azula propped herself on elbows in her surprise. Her head swerved to lock eyes with the hallucination that knelt beside the slab of rock where she reclined, when it reached to lay a perfectly manicured hand on her middle.

"This is a human being," her mother _not her mother_ intoned. Her brows drew together and her great eyes shone with hurt, fixed on Azula. "A precious baby."

_You only think so because it's _Zuko's, spoke her first flush of resentment, but Azula had enough self-control not to say this aloud. She still couldn't help snapping, "Don't _pretend!_" when she jerked roughly away from the touch and onto her side, lying with her back to the hallucination and arms locked tightly to her chest in a stance that was almost defensive. _You would have done the same to me, if Father let you. He told me the truth you were too craven to admit._ _You never wanted me_.

"That's not true," the thing whispered, responding to her bitter thoughts as readily as her words. It ran slender fingers through her hair. "I _love_ you, Azula. I **do**."

Something clenched painfully in her chest at the words she had heard too many times to count from this twisted mockery. Azula couldn't remember anymore if her real mother ever said that to her.

It wouldn't matter if she had. It would just be one more lie. Didn't her abandonment prove that? Didn't Ursa prove it every time she looked on her daughter with fear or disgust or indifference? Didn't she prove it with the things she said, the letters she never sent to school, the sparring matches she couldn't be bothered to attend? The goodbye she said to Zuko and not to her…

She had every day of eight years to prove it was a lie, and she proved it.

Azula drew a shuddering breath. She squeezed her eyes tightly closed, and said determinedly, "I'm giving you what you _want_, wherever you are.

"I'll find you. I'll give you your life back," she promised the mother who couldn't hear her, who wouldn't listen even if she could. "A life for a life, isn't that how it works?" Azula demanded. "I'll get the closure I need to end this, and never have to see you again. Until then, _be gone_."

When she opened her eyes, she didn't have to glance behind her to know the hallucination had gone. Sometimes it left at her command, other times it ignored her. Azula had long since stopped wondering why.

It wouldn't matter soon anyway. If this worked — and it had to — she would be rid of the hallucination forever. Rid of unwanted visits from the mother who hated her, unsolicited advice about precious babies…

It was her own business if she wanted it gone. It had no more right to her body than Zuko did. She could do it. She could. A few days, maybe a week without food and —

_Because that worked so well for you before_, she chided herself. Tears burned her eyes when she hugged herself around the middle in unconscious imitation of the night she lay bleeding in the hall.

It would be too easy to harm herself that way, but what else was left to her? Everyone knew that, exceptions like Taku aside, most Earth Kingdom doctors fell somewhere between butchers and medicine men. She would be a fool to trust her health to them, even without the added vulnerability of being a fugitive.

But she had to make a decision soon. She knew that much from the time before, even if so much else had changed…

That first time, she was hardly sick until she began drinking the tea. She had only put on a little weight — most of it in the swell of her hips and budding breasts, it seemed then — and sought out their court physician for a flu remedy when mild aches and a fatigue one fraction of what she felt now began to impair her training.

And in reply, he told her something incomprehensible. She hadn't even had her first blood. She didn't know what to look for then, but she knew now. She was almost four months gone when —

No one would ever talk about it afterward — and anyway, who would she talk to? — but Azula suspected this might have been why she hemorrhaged so badly. But she didn't _know_. She didn't know enough to fix this, if it could even be fixed. She didn't know what to do…

Azula inhaled sharply, brows forked and lips stretched tight against a sob that threatened to spill from her mouth. She uncoiled her limbs, and considered what it might mean for her to have this baby.

There was no guarantee she would be any safer carrying it to term than ridding herself of it now. She seemed to vaguely recall her doctors saying, after she starved herself, that she couldn't have children. Since obviously she was capable of conceiving, she could only guess they meant that she _shouldn't_ have children.

Well, they wouldn't be the first to hold that opinion. Azula could practically hear Ursa thinking it, when she said things like "What is wrong with that child?" in full hearing of her daughter. But her doctors didn't know her that well, she hadn't let them. And they would have different reasons for thinking so.

It might be that her body wasn't capable of bearing a child. That the strain of supporting a growing life and bringing it into the world would prove too great for organs that suffered permanent damage in her starvation attempt. Azula knew her endurance had taken a hit, even three years into her recovery. And she healed slower and less effectively than she used to, as evidenced by the persistence of her injuries from the fight with Zuko.

If that was true, if she couldn't — Then she would lose the baby without any effort on her part. Or she might die herself. Azula was mildly surprised to realize that after a month of living with the knowledge of her death sentence, and even longer spent knowing she was a fugitive from her own nation, the prospect held little dread for her.

More frightening in some ways was the possibility that this might actually happen. Beyond the violation of her body being given over to another life, her life might be given over to another person. Azula didn't know how to be a mother, any more than she knew how to be an aunt or a sibling. She had never had anything like a healthy example. And if she was honest with herself — something she strived for, even if she lied to everyone else — she knew.

It would only grow to hate her. How could it not? She was a monster.

She lay on her back with a hand on her stomach, and blinked away tears. They ran down the sides of her face and into her loose hair while she stared up at the half-moon that had climbed into her field of view, against a blanket of stars. She couldn't think about this right now.

She had more immediate concerns than prospective parenthood. Like making sure her body didn't fall to ruin again. She needed better food than she'd been eating, and that meant a return to civilization. Or what passed for it, in the Earth Kingdom.

Azula drew a deep breath and, peeling herself from the rock, climbed to her feet.

* * *

Toph punched her lumpy old pillow — rock-hard, just how she liked it — at the low murmur of voices raised in argument behind her back. She blew her bangs away from sightless eyes in frustration when the couple who shared the cramped little basket with her ignored Toph to keep retreading the same ground…

She needed to be with her girls. But none of them were hurt. But she should have been there. It was more important to find Azula. But Zuko had whole armies to call upon. They couldn't cross into the Earth Kingdom. But couldn't they fly to Kyoshi, enlist her squad for the mission? While Sokka searched by air, they could track her over land —

_Gods damn it, if they mention my element _one more time… Toph rolled over to face their general direction, clumsy with interrupted sleep and the true blindness of being suspended high above the ground in a wooden basket to bark, "_Hey_, can you think of the **children?**"

Suki went all silent and morose in that way Toph would never have believed until she spent almost a month cooped up in the same too-small space with her, but Sokka just spoke wearily, "You're _sixteen_, Toph."

"Yeah, and I'm also trying to sleep after a long, hard day of doing _nothing_ on the world's most **boring** manhunt!" she snapped, sitting up to contradict him.

"You should be glad it's boring," Suki spoke darkly. "If we had found Azula by now, it might be _you_ with a broken nose or back spasms from her surprise _chi_-blocking."

"Right," Toph dismissed flatly. "Sorry honey, but I think it would be Pissy Pissy Princess with bruises, after I kicked her crazy ass and bent some cuffs on her." Toph stretched and worked out a kink in her neck, ignoring the jolt of Suki jumping to her feet to stalk away to the opposite side of the balloon without a word.

"'Course, we have to _find_ her first," Toph complained, letting her hands drop. "And I'm not much use when I'm stuck up here blind as a wolf bat, am I?"

Sokka sighed at his wife's exit, followed by the rustle of his clothes when he moved to sit beside Toph against the side of the basket. She didn't start when he laid a solid hand on her arm. It was hardly the first time he'd done that over the past few days, and Toph was torn between appreciating the gesture — and that it meant he remembered she was cut off from her earthsense up here — and resenting him for babying her.

Who'd have ever guessed Snoozles would turn into a Team Mom? But with Sugar Queen halfway across the continent, Suki sulking about her squad mates, and Toph half-tempted to tear her own hair out by the roots just to relish the sweet, sweet pain, she guessed _someone_ had to step up.

"I know we haven't been able to give you much time on the ground," he acknowledged, with a comforting squeeze to her elbow before he let go. "But we'll move faster by air, now we have a lead to follow.

"And it's kind of hard not to see you coming, Toph," he added, probably picking up on her instinct to argue the point. "I know you can handle Azula, but it would still be better to get the drop on her."

"I _get it_, okay?" Toph bit out impatiently, lowering her voice to avoid drawing Suki back into the conversation. "But can you guys knock it off with the arguing? There's **nothing** to see up here, and I've had to listen to you going at it almost _nonstop _since we got that letter!"

Toph didn't add that the following message from Zuko contributed greatly to discontent aboard their repurposed war balloon. They had been on their way back to the island at Suki's insistence, when Sparky wrote to tell them he would clean up after Princess Crazy, and they shouldn't waste the trip.

The words were harmless enough, but Toph could still tell his prompting to search the southern continent was not so much a suggestion as an order. And all the sympathy Suki showed the wounded Fire Lord on their last visit was quickly forgotten, when she complained bitterly of Zuko treating them like his "personal hit squad."

That was the worst row she could remember the lovebirds ever having, in the few months they'd been married or even before. Sokka insisted they continue their search for the princess as planned, and prevailed when Toph supported his decision. He even defended Zuko to Suki, which was pretty big of him. Considering she knew since their whispered exchange that first night in the air that Snoozles had his doubts, same as Toph did…

"She's just worried about her friends," Sokka explained rather obviously. "To be honest, so am I. But this is bigger than any one of us, and we can't afford to get distracted," he spoke decisively. "It might have been Azula's plan to draw us all to one place. To divert attention from her, or line us up for some kind of attack." He paused. "I just wish I knew we could count on Zuko to hold up his end. You're sure you don't —"

"I _told_ you," Toph grumbled and tossed up her hands, tired of this line of questioning, even knowing as she did that there was little else to do up here. "I **can't** tell when someone's lying in a letter."

"But what reason would he have to lie at all?" Sokka speculated, his voice falling to a whisper.

"He may not have been lying," Toph pointed out. Again. "He might have left something out or told a half-truth. He might have been embarrassed, or nervous or afraid. The physical reaction is basically the same."

"Then why'd you only pick up on it when you did?" he argued, like they hadn't been over this multiple times. Toph was pretty sure she felt a headache coming on. And she was of the decided opinion that when her head hurt, everyone else's should too. Sokka continued, oblivious to his danger, "When he said he didn't know why she left him alive —"

"— and we shouldn't listen if she says something desperate?" Toph spoke flatly. "I was there too, Snoozles. I don't need the recap.

"But you're ignoring one crucial fact." She jabbed a finger in what she thought was his general direction, and scowled when Sokka had to reposition her hand to keep the effect. "This is _Azula_. After everything she's done, why would we believe anything she says?"

Sokka was silent for a long moment, and Toph dared to hope he'd let it go. But he finally replied, "A better question is, why would _Zuko_ think we'd believe her?"

Toph flopped back down on her sleeping bag, with a groan loud enough to draw Suki's light tread back to where they were seated. Sokka ignored her antics to add, "He knows better than anyone that she can't be trusted…"

"Ugh!" Toph burst out in frustration, twisting to throw the pillow at him. She heard Sokka grunt when he caught it. "You're like —"

"A dog with a bone?" Suki suggested helpfully.

"Like Twinkletoes on a moral tangent!" Toph seconded, and felt a little vindicated when he barked out a laugh at that. She still had it.

"_Look_," she propped herself up on her side to conclude debate, "this speculation is pointless until we find her anyway, and hear what she has to say. If she even _has_ anything to say, 'cause by all reports" — meaning Zuko's — "she's been muter than a hermit these past four years!"

"Somehow I don't see her going quietly," Suki put in, and Toph could practically hear the frown in her voice.

"She prob'ly don't see herself _going_ at all," Toph replied, unconcerned. "But she's gonna." She rolled onto her back to lay with hands behind her head, staring up the balloon she had been told was black as anything she ever laid eyes on, and muttered, "I've had enough of flying blind."

* * *

Azula didn't descend to the market town until the next day, after a frustrating evening spent half-naked in the river trying to wash the lingering brine from her clothes without the benefit of soap, and a paltry meal of red berries and some stunted little carrots and potatoes she had dug up earlier from an abandoned garden, beside the ruins of a cabin in the woods. She had at least managed to scrub off the dust of the road with her wet clothes, before she tried for the last time to clean them, and combed her fingers through her sopping hair until she got all the tangles out, thinking longingly of the spa at the Imperial Palace all the while.

She thought she looked perfectly adequate if not for the clothes. She didn't wish to draw attention or any more stares from other people on the street, who tended to look away from the challenge in her eyes when she met their stares with head held high. So clothes were the first thing she stole.

A timely fire in the stockroom was sufficient to draw the attention of the proprietor and send the customers scrambling in enough of a panic for Azula to easily snag a pair of pants, and a short-sleeved shirt and long overvest from a sidewalk sale. She ducked into a public bath across the street and used one of their changing booths to dress herself in the stolen articles, pitching her ruined clothes in a waste bin but keeping Rai's boots until she could find a better-fitted pair. She snatched a matching leather belt from where someone had draped it over a stall door on her way out of the locker room, and cinched it round her waist while she exited by a side alley.

From there, Azula followed her nose and the tantalizing hint of roast meat to an upscale restaurant across the street from a moon gate, which opened on an interior courtyard billed as Master Yu's Earthbending Academy. The restaurant sported some surprisingly dainty stone tables and café chairs in an outdoor dining area partitioned from street traffic. The autumn sun and favorable temperatures had drawn most patrons to eat outside, and Azula watched them out the corners of her eyes as she passed, deciding instantly and a little resentfully to find a less high-profile target for her lunch.

But she paused in her progress and looked around when she felt someone's stare, until her gaze fell on a richly dressed woman of an age with Ursa, watching her timidly from a seat at a table near the partition. Her black hair was piled atop her head, in a great mass that looked too heavy for her slender neck to support, and adorned with fresh flowers besides. She wore several rings, earrings, and a necklace all cut from the same jade, and layered silks of the pale ochre that was favored by members of Earth Kingdom nobility.

"I'm sorry to stare," she spoke correctly, her slanted eyes glinting. "You just remind me of … someone. In the set of your chin, the way you carry yourself…"

Now it was Azula's turn to stare, because she had seen those pale green eyes and that up-turned nose, the tiny, pointed chin before. This couldn't really be —

The woman gathered her skirts and stood from her chair. She executed a polite bow to Azula in the Earth Kingdom fashion, which the princess warily returned. "I am Poppy Beifong," she softly intoned, then straightened and lifted her coiffed head to add proudly, "My husband is Lao, of the Gaoling Beifongs. You have probably heard of us even in the Fire Nation."

"I'm from the colonies," Azula replied automatically, then thought to add, "but of course, your family's influence in trade is known there too." _Especially to anyone interested in companions of the Avatar_.

Poppy smiled vacuously, pleased with her reply, and gestured to the empty chair across from her. "My friend has had to cancel our engagement, and I am quite alone," she explained, properly not counting the manservant and two maids who stood behind her as company. "Won't you please join me for lunch?"

"Madame Beifong," the portly man leaned forward to object, his thin brows furrowed with concern. "It might not be prudent —" But he fell silent at a tinkling laugh from his mistress that reminded her of nothing so much as glass breaking, when Azula circled the elaborately carved half-wall that divided their dining area from the street, and threaded her way through the tables to take a seat across from Toph's mother.

Poppy Beifong would hardly be her first choice of dining companion. But then neither had King Bumi, who proved surprisingly amenable to letting her go, with only a little convincing. And being a half-starved fugitive, she would do well to take her meals where she could get them. That she had met Poppy by chance on her first day in town hardly pointed toward an ambush either.

"He thinks you are a _peasant_, my dear," she laughed from behind her white hand, "but we must forgive his ignorance." Azula nodded once coolly, not sparing a glance for the manservant who withdrew in silence, when the Beifong woman didn't either.

"I knew from almost the moment I saw you that you came from money," she confided, then broke off when a waiter approached them to ask if her companion would order anything. "What will you have?" she inquired kindly of Azula. "Please order anything you like, my treat."

"I'll have what you're having," Azula flatly replied, too distracted by the sights and smells of the steaming soup, garnished fish, stuffed prawns, sweetmeats and fresh bread, fried rice and pastries set before Poppy to remember her manners for a moment. "Thank you."

The older woman smiled and spoke to the young man waiting on them, "Keep seconds on hand, and bring a fresh pot of green for the young lady.

"As I was saying," she continued serenely, heedless of the interruption when their waiter left, "when one has been born to privilege, it's easy to recognize in others." She spread a thick orange jam deftly over a warm slice of bread and set this on a small plate that she slid across the tablecloth to Azula.

The princess eyed the offering for a only a moment before she accepted with a graceful inclination of her head. The etiquette came easily to her when she bothered to recall it, and she knew she must not show any hesitation. This woman might yet be shrewder than she appeared.

"I could see where you came from in your manners and deportment," she spoke easily, while Azula forced herself to take smaller bites than she would have wished and savored every one. "And of course, those eyes are unmistakable."

Those eyes flashed to the noblewoman seated across from her with a predator's focus, when Azula bolted down the last of her bread and prepared herself to flee or fight, as the case might be. But her hostess only smiled, mindless of her danger when she explained, "They are not the gold of Fire Nation royalty, but close enough to indicate you come from an old family." Azula relaxed a little, leaning in to the carved back of her chair. "The nobility, or one of their blood bastards. Do you mind if I ask which?"

"I am my father's trueborn daughter," Azula easily replied, recalling that the nobility of the Earth Kingdom were even more obsessed with lineage than their counterparts in the Fire Nation.

The waiter returned with a tray bearing a plate, a bowl of soup, and a likewise steaming cup of tea that he set before Azula, along with a fresh pot that he made room for on the small table before taking his leave.

Poppy nodded once with a quirk of her painted lips. "I thought as much," she acknowledged, while Azula piled a little of everything onto her plate. "But you must forgive me for observing that you are far from home, and seem to be without your attendants," she spoke softly, her arched brows drawn with concern. "What has caused you to forsake the protection of your family?"

Azula glanced across the table, taking her measure before she dropped her gaze to reluctantly admit, "I am — fleeing an arranged marriage."

She knew from the indrawn breath and the ring-bedecked hand that seized hers — Azula had to force herself not to jump — that she had correctly judged Toph's mother as a hopeless romantic. "Oh, how _terrible!_" Beifong exclaimed, her voice dripping with a sympathy that said _how terribly romantic_. "Is it really as bad as all that?"

"He's a fool and a _brute_," Azula spoke darkly, and withdrew her hand slowly enough to avoid giving offense. "I would not put my life in his hands if I could help it."

Poppy Beifong nodded solemnly while Azula double-tasked, helping herself to more of the bread and using this to sop up the hot and sour soup. She chewed just enough to avoid choking, and ate as quickly as she politely could. If she was going to fabricate a life story, it would be better not to do it on an empty stomach.

The unlikely mother of her blind earthbending enemy gave Azula a few minutes to eat in peace, polishing off her own bowl before she looked across the table again.

"Have you thought where you will go?" she asked gently, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to embark on a journey with no destination. Azula blinked once, and a warm light kindled in Poppy's eyes. "Or are you running to the arms of some secret lover?" She smiled wistfully. "A governor's son or lieutenant in the army?"

"No," Azula spoke quietly and drank down some of her tea to give herself time to think. Having no experience of lovers, she didn't trust herself to lie about an elopement. But she recalled Beifong's apology, the encounter that started all this. _You remind me of someone_…

"Actually, I'm looking for my mother."

"Why _dear_," Poppy Beifong exclaimed with wide eyes, and Azula suddenly found the endearment disgusting, "whatever happened?"

Her fingers clenched into fists on the linen tablecloth, and Azula swallowed hard against the bile in her throat. "When I was a little girl, she was falsely accused of a crime, and had to flee into exile or face a headsman's axe." Toph's mother lifted a hand to her painted mouth in shock. "My father was so distraught he died only a few weeks later, leaving the estate to my brother. He did his best to preserve our fortune, but he was only two years older than me, and had no head for business. He fell prey to duplicitous advisers, and brought us nearly to ruin."

Azula drew a deep breath, and brought the sorry story to a close. "My marriage was brokered in a last ditch attempt to regain our fortune. I wanted to help my family. I tried to do my duty, but —"

She didn't have to fake the tightness in her throat, the tears that gathered in the corners of her eyes when she recalled the flashes of that night that had begun to come back to her at the most unexpected times. When she slept or when she built a fire, when she lay on her back listening to the fall of distant waves or when she washed the grime from her skin at the end of the day. When she sat across a table from the mother of her enemy, weaving a lie with just enough truth in it to buy her cooperation.

Of his hands grasping, bruising, his weight heavy on her, suffocating. Of his arm around her waist, fingers clenched in her hair. The ridges of his scar rubbed against her cheek when he thrusted and panted, filling her. He didn't stop even when she forgot herself and screamed, when she started to bleed from the violence of his effort —

"You're shaking," Toph's mother whispered fearfully, and Azula did jump this time when two manicured hands laid hold of her wrists. She had walked around the table to stand over Azula without her even noticing. _Gods damn it, she had to be better than this_…

She glanced down and realized it was true. She jerked her hands back and looked away. "Poor child," Poppy murmured, and moved as if to stroke Azula's hair before she stopped herself. "No one would blame you for leaving a man like that. Your mother, wherever she is, wouldn't blame you." Azula looked up when Toph's mother resumed her seat to say, "I know when you find her, she'll understand."

Azula couldn't help it. She laughed. A mirthless chuckle burst from her lips, then two, then three guffaws in quick succession, until she had to bow her head and her shoulders shook with laughter. Her attendants looked on Azula warily, but Poppy Beifong only asked, "What is so funny?"

"Because," Azula gasped, and finally managed to stem the flow of her laughter, "**that's** what mothers do." She shook her head twice as if to deny it, a manic grin tugging at her mouth when she repeated, "_They understand_." The manservant and two maids appeared quite convinced she had gone crazy, but Poppy's face fell like someone shouted a swear word in the middle of her garden party.

Azula stabbed at the fish with chopsticks and a sort of savage glee, while the powdered noblewoman looked at her more closely. "Do — do you — know my _daughter?_" she asked slowly at last, watching the princess as if she both hoped for and dreaded a confirmation.

"I met her three times in passing," Azula spoke coolly, collecting herself to fix Beifong with an impartial gaze. "Why?"

"Did she ever talk about — her parents?" Poppy asked, and Azula stared flatly while she rolled a flaking piece of fish in her mouth, savoring the spices before she swallowed. Was this woman actually under the impression that the blind little earthbender sent her here as some kind of punishment? That was either amazing ignorance or amazing egotism, Azula couldn't decide which. "Did she ever talk about me?"

"Why would she?" Azula rejoined, polishing the edge of impatience from her voice with a conscious effort. "We aren't friends."

"Toph never had many of those, growing up. None, in truth, until she ran away to join the Avatar," Poppy admitted quietly to the tablecloth, if her dropped gaze was anything to go by. She picked up her chopsticks and pushed food around her half-empty plate while she talked, a nervous habit that spoke of weakness. Azula continued to eat, but watched her in silence, wondering what prompted this unasked for confession.

"Her father and I — wanted —" Toph's mother paused to breathe deeply, and said, "We tried for — several years to give her a sibling. Someone her own age she could laugh with and play with, share all her secrets with, but —" Tears ran down her powdered face, until the stouter of the two maids stepped unobtrusively forward to offer Poppy an embroidered handkerchief that she used to dab at her eyes.

"It wasn't easy for me," she spoke hollowly, and Azula had to set her chopsticks down when Beifong looked up at her, grief radiating from every line of her face. "Her brothers and sisters never lived long — after —" She shook her head with painted lips pursed to whisper, "They weren't strong enough."

Azula's hands jerked compulsively before she managed to hide them under the tablecloth, the fingers of her left hand just brushing the seat of her stomach before she remembered herself and pulled them away. Poppy kept speaking, oblivious to her upset as she wound the folds of her handkerchief around and around clenched fingers. "And the more we lost, the more afraid we grew of — of losing _her_. Our only one…

"When the midwife laid dear Tuofu in my arms, I thought — she would be my own porcelain doll," Poppy whispered fondly, looking right through Azula where the princess sat across from her. "I would dress her in the finest silks, weave flowers in her hair and sit at tea with her and her stuffed animals. I would teach her everything I knew."

A smile broke over her tear-streaked face then, bittersweet and more genuine than any she had yet shown. "Instead, she handed me an earthbender. A bold, fearless little thing, more rock than flower. She had none of my delicacy, but she was **strong**, oh yes. She had to be," Poppy glanced down at the handkerchief twisted in her hands, and spoke sadly. "_She lived_."

The noblewoman sniffled discreetly to admit, "But even as she grew and — when we learned of her abilities, all I could see, all either of us could see was — her _dis_ability." She dipped her coiffed head in shame. "We wanted her safety more than anything in this world. Even more than — than we wanted her happiness. We were selfish and — blind. And we are still paying the price for that blindness."

She looked up to meet Azula's unblinking stare, and explained, "Toph wrote to us, four years ago. She came home to visit after the war, with … one of them." She waved a dismissive hand before settling back into her former melancholy. "But she had a fight with her father, and left in the middle of the night. I have not seen or heard from her since. Sometimes," her voice caught, and fresh tears started to her eyes, "I wonder if I ever will again."

"Why are you telling me this?" Azula spoke at last, and Poppy Beifong looked actually _at_ her, in evident confusion.

"Excuse me?" she said politely, sounding rather like she had a bad head-cold.

Azula stood so quickly she became dizzy, and had to brace her hands against the table to keep from collapsing back into her chair. "Why are you telling me," she demanded, her low voice quivering with anger when she pointed to the foothills at the edge of town, "when you could be telling _her?_"

And all the while, she kept thinking this was stupid. Utterly and incomprehensibly stupid. This was like something Zuko would do.

Azula had nothing to gain if Toph Beifong should start speaking to her mother again. Especially if that mother should mention lunch with a certain runaway noble of the Fire Nation, and relay her physical description to the sighted members of Team Avatar.

Azula knew all this, consciously. She also knew she couldn't sit here one more second and listen to this ridiculous shit without spontaneously combusting.

She felt sick. She felt sick, and at first she thought it was just this stupid, stupid woman with her stupid teary-eyed confessions to complete strangers because Azula hadn't thrown up in almost two days, and she couldn't now when she just had her first decent meal since before she found out she was pregnant, and Toph's mother was stumbling through some explanation of how the little blind earthbender was so hard to track down because she traveled all the time and was hardly ever at her academy, but Azula couldn't even attend closely enough to wonder what —

She bolted and ran straight into a waiter, sending his tray crashing to the cobblestones. She didn't stop running until she barely reached a decorative fern in time to disgorge her lunch and probably everything she'd eaten in the last twenty four hours into the potting soil. Halfway between sitting and kneeling, she gripped the edge of the painted pot and shivered, and felt like her stomach was being pinched in half.

The restaurant staff and patrons and even passersby were staring at her, and a low buzz of speculation drummed up in the wake of her exit. A few of them might even recognize her, but Azula couldn't run because she couldn't breathe, and this was doubly unfortunate because she was sick with enough force to bring tears to her eyes, and now that she had started crying, she couldn't seem to stop…

Goddamn baby. Goddamn Zuko. She would kill him for this.

At a word from their mistress, one of Poppy Beifong's maids appeared at her back to support her while another knelt beside Azula to strip the belt from her waist with practiced hands. She slumped into the arms of the first, stouter one with an audible sigh of relief, massaging her stomach with a splayed hand. The slippered feet of Toph's mother approached before she had a chance to stand.

"Oh, you poor dear," Poppy whispered, understanding clear in her eyes when she looked down on Azula. "You should have run sooner."

_You have no idea_, she thought, a little wildly. _No idea_…

Azula meant to laugh, at least as much as she had meant to do anything since partway through this surprisingly painful interview, but it came out half a sob. She shook her head at the maids when they moved to help her up and clambered to her feet instead. Azula crossed arms defensively beneath tender breasts and reflected that her headache had finally gone away, only to leave her with aches in parts of her body she didn't give a thought to otherwise.

"I may not have been the best at this," Toph's mother offered, spreading her hands in apology, "but I can tell when a girl needs her mother. If you let me, I would do what I can to help you find her."

Azula gave her a long look, as cool and measured as any reply, before she dipped her head in acceptance.

* * *

Zuko looked again on the scroll he held, in disbelief and mounting frustration. How could his crew let this happen, and after they caught him so handily?

"Hate to say I told you so," spoke a low voice from behind him, and Zuko scowled where he sat reading atop a rotting old stump, under the dappled sunlight that fell beneath the trees outside the village of Chin. June had read the notice of the Dai Li's escape over his shoulder, and watched him now with a burning contempt that belied her easy sarcasm. She didn't step back when Zuko sprang to his feet, angry at the intrusion.

"How was I supposed to know he was a metalbender?" Zuko spoke defensively. "Even with Toph's school, they're still really rare —"

"You might have _guessed_," June snapped, laying a hand on the whip at her belt, "when you're friends with the world's first."

"It was the only honorable thing to **do!**" he insisted, burning the scroll to ash in his hands when he strode across the forest floor to turn his back on her. "I couldn't _kill_ him after he surrendered! Under the laws of war —"

"This isn't war, it's a _witch hunt_," June hissed poisonously, in tandem with an eerily similar sound from the shirsu, which lashed the air with his barbed tongue as if to taste it. She grabbed Zuko's shoulder and tugged him about, more intent than he could ever remember her being in their limited interactions. "Times have changed, and you'd better change with them if you want to survive."

He didn't reply beyond a baleful glare, just pressed his lips together against the angry retort he would have made, if he didn't need June to find his sister. But she only grew more irritated at his forbearance, and shoved him back with a gloved hand to the chest and the unsubtle threat, "Next time you hesitate, I'll make sure you get what he would've got."

"I'd like to see you _try_," Zuko bit out, before his better judgment could overrule his growing dislike. But June only smiled. It was not a nice smile.

"That's the spirit," she condescended to reply, walking away to release Nyla from the tree she leashed him to. "Save some of that fire for our enemies, I'll show you where to direct it." She glanced over her shoulder with a wry quirk of her brow, before she walked out of sight behind the beast. "And we'll be through with each other in no time."

Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled a long, calming breath when she climbed up in the saddle. He had sent the hawk back with instructions for his crew and Ty Lee to proceed on to the Fire Nation. There was nothing for it now but to recapture the Dai Li, the quicker the better to minimize the damage he might do.

"Come on," June urged shortly, patting the space behind her on the saddle. "Let's chase this bastard to his hidey hole, find out what he knows."

Zuko climbed up behind her, and didn't miss when she muttered, "And maybe _this_ time, you'll let me kill him."

* * *

Poppy Beifong may be everything Azula had learned to despise in her mother, but she was as good as her word.

Some five hours after their attempt at lunch, and subsequent visits to her tailor and shoemaker, a grocer and a scribe and the Beifong estate, Azula was back on her way and much better provisioned than before. A few of these items — like the oil lamp and kerosene — she would undoubtedly end up selling, but the craftspersons had proven otherwise very open to practical suggestion. And Azula was not about to tip them off by revealing she was a firebender anyway.

Her sandals, pair of shoes, and the boots she wore now were of plain but sturdy construction. Her clothes had been selected for every condition from scorching heat to bitter cold, and altered to accommodate a growing bust and waistline, if that was needed. The food she packed was dried, salted, and otherwise preserved, more than enough to keep her until the next town, even if she was eating for two.

She had a bedroll secured atop her pack for the first time in her flight, and soap, comb, and even oils for her hair when next she stopped to bathe. She thought she would use this last sparingly though. It smelled of camphor, said to be repellant to snakes and other reptiles, and to insects for its strong scent. It was repellant to Azula because it had an aroma not unlike the tea she drank to cleanse her womb the first time, and made her feel a little sick to breathe. She had the same problem with mint tea, and avoided it ever after.

Azula accepted only what help she and the ostrich horse could carry, knowing that even if Poppy didn't recognize her — and even if the townspeople didn't recognize her — word would probably get back to Lao Beifong eventually, of just whom his wife had harbored.

She had not seen any wanted posters bearing her image in Gaoling or any of the few towns she stopped in so far, but then, she had not seen much of the city before being taken into the protective bubble of Poppy Beifong's company. No one approached them or questioned her presence, and the peasants fell all over themselves to give her what she asked, because Azula asked it with Poppy Beifong and her mobile staff of servants at her back.

It just reinforced what her research had suggested, that the Beifongs were practically royalty in their corner of the Earth Kingdom. Azula had to wonder how such a wealthy and influential family had produced someone so loud and coarse as Toph Beifong. But then she would remember the looks Ursa gave her when she insisted on wearing pants instead of dresses, gentle remonstrations spoken from behind pinched brows and wrinkled nose, when Azula would rather practice katas than heat tea with her firebending. And she didn't have to wonder anymore.

Rejection could take many forms, after all. She should know that better than anyone.

The first light of dawn had just broken behind the trees that blanketed the eastern horizon, when Azula felt safe enough to stop in her circuitous flight. She had not noticed any pursuit in leaving Gaoling but didn't want to take any chances, and so followed a winding path that directed the ostrich horse through streams and over rock and switched directions often beneath the shadow of the pines. Even if no one was chasing her now, she felt sure they would eventually, with such a finely bred and impeccably groomed ostrich horse as Toph's mother gave her.

Azula had managed to beg off accepting any human accompaniment, with the excuse that her mother was still a wanted fugitive and might be in some danger of discovery. But Beifong had insisted she might have need of a fast mount, and sent her on her way with the least skittish of the racing ostrich horses from her own family stables.

Azula had stopped to rub it down with dust from the road, feeling half a fool, and ruffle its feathers a bit as soon as she was out of sight of Gaoling. But she doubted this would be enough to avert any covetous gaze. She would cross the mountains northward as soon as possible, and trade to the Si Wongi for something more practical.

Maybe an eel hound, she considered hopefully as she slipped down from the saddle, to tie her mount by the reins to the slender trunk of a tall elm. The desert dwellers were known to traffic in exotic beasts, and it would move much faster over land, now that she had a destination in mind.

She had studied the maps at the scrivener's shop as surreptitiously as she could, and requested one depicting the lands around the East and West Lakes, and the narrow isthmus that divided them known as the Serpent's Pass. This was not directly opposite her actual destination, which would be much too obvious, but far enough off that she should not run into any pursuit, if anyone asked where she was headed.

Azula had already eaten in the saddle, and was too drained from her long ride to want to do much more than sleep. Still she sat tailor style on her bedroll with her back against the trunk of a fallen tree, and took from her pack the first-class passport and sealed scroll Poppy Beifong had given her just before she left.

She debated again whether she should burn the first, but decided she would use it only in desperate need. She knew well enough from when she lent Ty Lee her seal that people would remember seeing such an official document, if any pursuit should follow her from Gaoling. Still, it never hurt to have a tile up her sleeve.

The letter was another matter. Poppy Beifong pressed it into her hands, eyes shining with hope as she explained that she had sent a copy to the metalbending academy and to the Fire Nation palace, but if Azula should run across her daughter, wouldn't she please give this to Toph? The princess had nodded curtly, half-tempted to reduce Toph's mother to ashes for the possibility that this peace offering might sic Zuko on her.

Oh well. She already knew it was stupid to intervene. This just proved it.

Azula broke the seal with a slim finger, to see whether the damning letter held any mention of her. She read it through once quickly, and then again. By the third reading, her eyes burned and she began to find it hard to breathe. She gripped the edges of the scroll so hard it crumpled, and had to squeeze her eyes tightly closed before she could loosen her grip. The letter held no mention of her. It said —

It didn't matter what it said.

Azula burned the letter. She watched it burn to ashes in her hands, and then wiped them clean on the legs of her pants. She lay on her side on the bedroll in the chill dawn air. She lay with her back to the limited protection of the felled tree and wrapped her arms around her middle, and tried to sleep against the dual distractions of the fire of the rising sun in her veins.

And an ache in a part of her body she didn't give a thought to otherwise.


	15. Lost

**Sorry for the long delay in updating (I know, so unprecedented) but the laptop I write on malfunctioned through most of December, making it difficult to maintain progress on the chapter. The latter two-thirds of it was actually written mostly in the past week and a half, but it helped that these were developments I'd been contemplating a long time.**

**Many thanks to my reviewers last chapter. Your input, praise, and constructive criticism mean a lot to me, and I'm glad you took the time to give back. Also, special thanks as always to Meneldur, whose early input on the chapter helped clarify my thoughts.**

**Toph, Sokka, and Suki will return to the story in (I'm estimating) five or six chapters, when they become more plot-relevant. And don't worry, not even immovable Toph will escape character development here. (That's an aspect of storytelling I like to use generously.)**

**I'm going with "Nyla is a male" based on info I gained from the Avatar wiki, which also gave me the idea to bring June's father into the plot. (But I know what you mean, as I had a friend named Nila who was a girl, and the name does have that sound.)**

**I have perhaps fifteen to twenty more chapters planned for _Dominion_, then a sequel titled _Thrones_. (Guess what that one's about. Go ahead, guess ;)**

**And we saw last chapter and in chapter 12 that Azula has no moral objection to abortion, but avoids that option this time around due to other fears. I can only encourage concerned readers to stick around, as her destination (and the journey) may surprise you.**

**Speaking of which, I think those were all the questions I had to answer (or could answer, without spoilers), so I will leave you to the chapter. It's extra long this time, but I wanted to focus on Mai, Zuko, Azula (and Ty Lee) all in the same chapter, to emphasize some parallels in their characters and their journeys. And I wanted to end on a cliffhanger, after the more sedate pace of last chapter.**

**I hope you enjoy regardless, and please leave a review.**

* * *

Her leg bounced nervously on the cushion of a couch in the sunlit sitting room, while Mai watched her over the rim of a painted teacup without comment. Ty Lee bit her lip, and the Fire Lady sighed and put her cup down on the coffee table between them.

"Are you under the impression I'm mad at you or something?" she spoke bluntly, startling Ty Lee out of her internal debate.

"Oh, uh — no!" Ty Lee rushed to reassure her, embarrassed. "I was just thinking."

Mai pursed her lips at this, as if she would ask what Ty Lee was thinking, but she didn't. Ty Lee didn't miss the lemon-yellow that rippled across the muddied blue and green of her aura though. She had never seen it such a color, even when Mai was so depressed after Zuko first got banished. She was a little afraid to ask what could make it that color. Mai's reply a moment later prevented her.

"Good," she said brusquely, considering the acrobat. "Because I wouldn't blame you for Zuko's mistake. He's made enough of those lately that I know just who to blame," Mai added flatly, her eyes flashing to betray the bitterness her voice papered over. Ty Lee blinked, not sure how to take that.

"Though it sounds like a smart move, getting this bounty hunter on his side," Mai admitted, smoothing the edge of her crimson robes when she sat forward on the couch opposite Ty Lee. "If half the things I've heard about her are true, we'll have Azula back in custody within the month."

Ty Lee's heart sank. She already knew this wasn't going to be easy, but now Mai just confirmed it. "Actually, that's what I wanted to talk to you about." She sat up straighter and took a deep breath to speak with conviction, "I don't think she should go back to the asylum."

Her eyes narrowed, but Mai didn't say anything at first. Ty Lee guessed that was a good sign. Usually she had some excuse ready or just redirected the conversation, not that Ty Lee had much opportunity to talk to her anymore anyway. She actually saw Mai less often than she saw Azula. Ty Lee still felt a little guilty about that, but Mai was always so busy, and Mai and Zuko would never even talk about Azula when she was the one who brought them all together in the first place…

"I know you think that," Mai said at last, hands folded in her lap and voice tightly controlled. "And I know why you think that. What I _don't_ know is why you feel the need to tell me this again."

"Be_cause!_" Ty Lee burst out desperately, throwing her arms out in mute argument. "She — There's just — things you don't know," she stumbled through a partial explanation, as much as she could tell without betraying Azula's trust. Even if she didn't say it, it was pretty obvious she didn't want anyone to know about the baby. "Reasons it would be **really bad **to send her back," Ty Lee tried to impress on her, shaking her head for emphasis.

A shuriken had appeared in Mai's right hand, probably one of the many she secreted about her person. She polished this with a trailing sleeve, when she lightly demanded, "She tell you they abused her? And here I thought it was her dad."

"_What?_" Ty Lee squeaked, tears springing to her eyes. The casual comment registered with all the sudden force of the ground rushing up at her, when she first began to train and fell a lot more than she did now. She knew he was a bad guy, but he wouldn't really hurt his daughter, would he? And Ty Lee remembered Fire Lord Ozai shaking her like a rag doll the night she ran away, his bruising grip on her arm when he hauled her through the palace. If he would treat someone else's kid that way…

But Azula was so strong, she wouldn't let anyone do that to her, would she? At least she would have told Ty Lee, they were best friends! And she recalled blood on the fingers that clutched her hair, when Azula screamed, _Leave it alone!_

"I shouldn't have said — I'm sorry," Mai spoke flatly across from her, and Ty Lee believed her. Besides her aura, she looked almost embarrassed, her brows just visible beneath the harsh line of her bangs where they drew together in consternation. "It isn't true. I just wanted to see if she lied to you."

"I can **tell** when she's lying, Mai," Ty Lee pointed out dejectedly, leaning forward to encircle her knees. _I can tell when _you're_ lying too_.

"I know you think that," Mai grudgingly replied, twirling the shuriken between her slim fingers in a distinctly irritated fashion. "And you've known her for a long time," she anticipated Ty Lee's argument as deftly as Azula would. "But you only ever see the good in people, and you've got so used to seeing it that —" she hesitated, then plowed ahead, "I think sometimes you see it even when it isn't there."

"Are you saying," Ty Lee spoke slowly, in disbelief, "there's no good in her _at all?_"

"I'm saying she's good at pretending," Mai hedged, holding the shuriken still. "And you might have been fooled —"

"No, **you** might have been fooled!" Ty Lee countered and jumped to her feet so quickly Mai shrank back in annoyance at her outburst. "'Cause you're fooling _yourself!_ I know she did some bad things, some **awful** things even, but that was four years ago and she was just a _kid!_ We **all** were!" she argued, thrusting her hand out at Mai in illustration. "And most of that stuff she did on her dad's orders, and who knows what he would've done if she refused —"

"Oh yes, poor **helpless** little victim," Mai interrupted coldly, rising to her feet with more grace than Ty Lee. "It's not like she ever had a choice."

"She had a choice, but this stuff makes a _difference_, Mai!" Ty Lee insisted, desperate to make her see it. "It makes a difference how we judge what she did! And we **know** now she was crazy!" Ty Lee seized on the horrible truth with more enthusiasm than she would ever have guessed, spreading her hands to offer explanation. "Doesn't that make a difference to _you?_"

"It might," Mai spoke slowly, her arms crossed with elbow gripped in one hand and her shuriken in another. "If I believed it."

"If —" Ty Lee echoed, incredulous. Four years, and she never said this 'til now. "How could you _not_ believe it?"

Mai just leveled a flat stare at her, as unmoved and unmoving as a statue. And Ty Lee felt compelled to keep talking, "Even if — you thought she just made it up to — to avoid prison or something," she grasped at the logic only loosely, because it was disgusting, "you **can't** deny what it did to her! She starved herself almost to death, she _almost died!_"

Tears stung her eyes at the memory of how close she came to losing her oldest friend, and Ty Lee circled the table to confront her second-oldest friend more directly. "Her doctors and nurses and orderlies all **saw** it," she insisted, holding out her hands and hoping Mai would meet her halfway, would accept the truth so freely offered. She had to, for her own sake as much as Azula's. "Her guards and Aang and I all saw it. You _can't_ just deny that it happened!"

Mai looked away then, and turned her shoulder to Ty Lee. And the acrobat stopped in her tracks. Realization leaked through cold and creeping as the egg Ty Lin broke over her head that one time. "Or maybe you _can_ deny it," she whispered, horrified, and took a swift step back with hands raised before her when Mai lifted her head. "Maybe that's why you didn't go see her, even then…"

"I didn't see her because she treated me like shit," Mai spoke deliberately. Her aura flooded with the murky red of unforgiveness, the harsh words fell from her lips with all the weight of a sentence passed. "And I don't owe her anything."

"You owe her _Zuko!_" Ty Lee argued, her fingers springing open at the absurdity of having to point this out to Mai. She faltered a little at the suspicious glare she got in reply, but tried to explain, "I mean — you guys wouldn't have met and fell in love if you weren't Azula's friend first, so — You owe her Zuko."

"Oh yes, how much I owe her," Mai whispered bitterly, turning away. Her fingers closed around the blade, and Mai held it close. "She gives, and she takes away…"

Ty Lee's eyes widened in concern when she followed Mai across the carpet to the open window shaped like a keyhole. This looked out on a flowered courtyard and carved stone bench where her son sat playing with blocks at his nanny's feet. She watched Mai watch him for a minute before she asked, "Don't you want to tell me what happened?"

Mai's head swerved to look at her in something like alarm. "_What?_" she demanded, staring.

"I mean, it might help you to talk about —"

"How did —" Mai cut across her, disbelief quickly crumbling to incandescent rage when twin spots of red colored her cheeks. "I can't **believe** this!" she hissed, with such venom Ty Lee took a step back in alarm at finding that hateful gaze directed at her. She was reminded uncannily of how Azula reacted to Mai's rejection at the Boiling Rock, and found it hard to fathom how Mai hadn't run for the hills on receiving such a look. "She _told you_ about Zuko?"

Ty Lee held her hands up in a warding gesture and spoke hastily, "What _about_ Zuko?"

She only realized her mistake when Mai closed off her anger behind a mask of indifference, to grit out, "_Nothing_." At least she loosened her grip on the shuriken; she had looked about ready to chuck it at the first thing that moved.

"It doesn't **look** like nothing," Ty Lee gathered her courage to protest, and could have kicked herself when she realized Azula would have known enough to pretend she already knew, so Mai would tell her. But Mai's reaction had scared her, and the acrobat wasn't as good at extracting information from people, so she argued instead, "Your aura —"

"I think we've embarrassed each other enough for one day," Mai spoke over her unsteadily, turning back to the window to dismiss Ty Lee. "Captain Tadao," she called over her shoulder, and the imperial firebender who headed her household troops appeared in the doorway, clad in the spiked armor of his office minus faceplate. "Escort the lady Ty Lee to her rooms," Mai said flatly. She barely spared a glance for the acrobat to add, "We'll talk later."

But they wouldn't.

They wouldn't because Mai never wanted to talk about Azula, and was extra unlikely to want to talk about Azula when she had problems of her own with Zuko. Ty Lee felt bad about that, and she wanted to help Mai, she really did, but Mai wouldn't tell her anything, and even though her problems seemed bad, Azula's could get her _killed_ —

"Please, Mai!" Ty Lee begged, when the captain took her arm to lead her away. "Don't just ignore this! The Earth Kingdom put a _death sentence_ on her," she tearfully disclosed, ignoring the stout Captain Tadao when he tugged gently on her arm to urge her from the room. "If they catch Azula, they're going to **execute** her!"

Mai didn't react at all, didn't say anything or look at her or even tense where she stood staring out the window. And Ty Lee realized, to her horror, that Mai _already knew_ Azula was sentenced to die, and wasn't doing anything about it. She **had** to do something!

"I know you guys had problems, and — maybe you think she was never your friend," Ty Lee argued desperately over her shoulder, while Tadao tried vainly to corral her from the room. "But she thought of you as a friend, Mai, she _told_ me so! She fought so hard to get better, she's a **better** person now, and she deserves a second chance! But she'll never get that chance unless we help her, _please_," Ty Lee stressed, tears springing to her eyes when the captain succeeded in herding her toward the door, and Mai still didn't bend, "you **have** to help her!"

The Fire Lady turned toward them, raised one white hand to stop the captain from removing her, and Ty Lee sagged in relief a moment before she realized Mai's intent.

"I don't have to do anything," Mai coldly denied. "Not anymore. I said my goodbyes at the Boiling Rock, and I meant them. I hoped your actions might prove you were ready to cut ties with her too. But clearly you can't be trusted to know what's best for you," she spoke sharply, then seemed to pause.

"I'll never forget that you saved my life from Azula," Mai admitted, softening fractionally. "I'll always owe you that. But I don't owe her anything," she insisted again, and Ty Lee wondered how many times Mai had told herself that.

She drew a deep breath. "If you want to throw your life away for someone who will use and discard you, that's your choice. Just don't come crying to me when she shows her true colors," Mai warned darkly, running a thumb along the edge of her shuriken as she considered the blade. "And don't think for a second I would lift a finger to save her miserable life."

Ty Lee barely noticed Mai's gesture to the captain to remove her from the room, when these words came crashing down around her. She couldn't let this happen. They were _both_ her best friends! She couldn't let one best friend stand by while another best friend got killed! She had to —

"It's _more_ than just her life at stake!" Ty Lee blurted in desperation, struggling against the captain's spike-edged arm at the threshold of the room, rewarded when Mai looked up in question. "She's pregnant!"

And Mai's aura turned black. It turned black.

Ty Lee was so surprised by the change, brief as it was, that she needed a moment to register Mai's wide eyes and white face gone rigid with shock, or that the guard captain had let her go, and why —

"Oh my gosh, _Mai!_" Ty Lee cried in alarm, when she saw that Mai had cut herself. The shuriken's edge sliced so deeply into her palm and fingers that she was dripping blood on the carpet, but Mai only drew a quick breath. She didn't drop the blade but didn't resist either when Captain Tadao wrenched it from her grip and tore a length of fabric from her sleeve to wrap her bleeding hand, shouting to one of the guards who ran in from the hall to send for the court physician.

"My h— my hand slipped," Mai said tightly, her light eyes brimming with tears. She clutched her wrapped hand in the other and breathed deeply as if to keep from screaming. "I didn't —"

Captain Tadao urged her into a chair near the window, looking on the Fire Lady with undisguised pity. Ty Lee was already moving forward, all argument forgotten in Mai's obvious distress, but one of the guards from the hall grabbed her from behind. A few quick punches to his pressure points put him flat on his back, but that just left an opening for the next one to pin her arms behind her.

"Mai!" she cried desperately, at the same time as the guard captain asked what was to be done with her. Ty Lee couldn't glimpse her face through the guards that closed around her, but heard Mai whisper harshly, "_Get her out_." Disheartened, Ty Lee didn't resist when two of them pulled her into the lamplit hall.

She wasn't taken to her usual guest rooms but to a bare little study somewhere in the interior in the palace. It had no windows, and only one door. Ty Lee had paced the edges of it too many times to count, tried to practice her acrobatics and failed more due to lack of concentration than lack of space, and asked for Mai several times over the course of probably an hour, before a knock finally sounded at the heavy iron door.

"Come in," Ty Lee called weakly and stood from her chair at the desk. Captain Tadao walked in and closed the door behind him, and Ty Lee tried not to let her disappointment show. He was a nice guy, with bags under his eyes that reminded her of Mai's dad, and he always took Ty Lee's suggestions seriously when she talked to him about palace security. "Is Mai — Fire Lady Mai going to be okay?" she demanded, worried anew when it wasn't her friend that showed up.

The captain nodded wearily, removing his triple-pronged helmet to lay this on the desk. He drew the chair toward him and took a seat, possibly to make Ty Lee feel more comfortable. "She should recover full use of her hand," he spoke quietly, "though the doctor says it's too early to tell if there will be any scarring."

Ty Lee leaned against the edge of the desk with arms wrapped around her middle at a fresh stab of remorse. Maybe she shouldn't have said anything, but she never could have guessed — "I just can't believe she reacted that way," Ty Lee said at last. "I mean, she was almost more upset than _Azula_ when she found out, and it has nothing to **do** with her!" she protested.

"The princess and Lady Mai are family now, whether they like it or not," Captain Tadao pointed out. "It has more to do with her and those she holds dear than you might think. And if I had to hazard a guess," he spoke reluctantly, as if unsure of how much he could say, but wanting to relieve her conscience, "I would say it wasn't so much this alone as … the latest in a recent line of insults."

"But _what_ insults?" Ty Lee asked helplessly, spreading her hands. "What's going on with her and — and Zuko?"

"She would not thank me for telling you what I know," the captain replied cautiously, rising to his feet to tuck the helmet under his arm. He shook his head. "And that's little enough to be worth risking my job."

"But she obviously needs to talk to someone —"

"It is my understanding she confides in her uncle," the captain interrupted. "Lady Mai sent for him after the doctor had seen her, and she had some time to calm down."

"But I'm _right here!_" Ty Lee gestured to the room at large, hurt by the obvious oversight. "Why can't she just talk to **me?**"

Captain Tadao considered her a little sadly when he set the helmet back on his head, before he finally spoke, "I think you know the answer to that question."

Ty Lee nodded dejectedly. She did know the answer to that question, even if she had hoped this would never happen again. Even if she feared it would, ever since she began to realize how Mai still felt about Azula…

_Was it because you didn't want to make me choose again? Or because you didn't think I'd choose you?_

Captain Tadao pressed a ticket into her hand, to say, "She requests you return to Kyoshi Island, and wishes you a safe journey. She has arranged transport for you." He bowed to take his leave of her, but stopped on his way out the door when Ty Lee said, "Wait!"

She had not been completely idle in the hour she spent waiting here, and the study had afforded her little other occupation than either to write or to think. The former option eventually won out, and Ty Lee retrieved the letter from a pocket in her skirts, holding it out to Captain Tadao. "Would you give this to her?"

The captain considered her offering for a long moment, and Ty Lee realized he was probably debating whether Mai would even read the letter, rather than whether he should deliver it. "Of course, my lady" he replied then, accepting the scroll.

"Thanks," Ty Lee said softly, remembering her manners. She returned his flame salute this time, and when the captain bowed again to say, "May Agni light your way," she replied, "and keep your fire in the dark."

He nodded once and exited into the hall, leaving the way open to her and the half-dozen guards who would escort her to the harbor. But despite their faceless presence, in that moment Ty Lee felt very much alone.

* * *

Zuko was absurdly glad June wasn't there to see him puke. She thought little enough of his stomach already.

Traveling with her was fast becoming the boot camp from hell, as even the smallest hesitation on his part only made June more fanatic in her efforts to "toughen him up." It reminded Zuko uncomfortably of his father's early tutelage, before Ozai gave up shaping him into an unfeeling weapon of war, and turned his sights to Azula instead.

When they sparred, June took cheap shots and broke her promise to put aside her whip if he didn't use his bending. Of course, she was happy enough to use him as target practice when he tried to turn her down the next time. When they hunted for food, she made him kill their prey and dress it. When he cooked their food, she took his portion from him, until he had to either steal his dinner back or guard it from her in the first place…

When they caught up to the Dai Li a few days later, she made Zuko interrogate him.

The struggle that ensued when they discovered him holed up in the mountains outside Gaoling was brief, but brutal. Zuko had taken a shot to the ribs that still pained him every time he breathed in, and the shirsu sat nearby, licking a long gash on its right front leg. Zuko guessed the beast must be immune to its own venom, because it didn't look likely to fall over any time soon.

Nyla had raised his ugly head when Zuko staggered from the blood-scented dark of the cave and out into the dappled sunlight that filled the flowered clearing, but seemed to lose interest when he merely threw up in the bushes rather than run. The shirsu returned to licking its wounds with a guttural growl that sounded bizarrely like muttered disapproval.

_Great_, Zuko thought, walking on shaky legs across the clearing to sit tailor style with his back to the trunk of a tree. Even the dumb animal didn't think he could do this.

Maybe he couldn't, Zuko considered, holding his pounding head in his hands.

He couldn't stop thinking about the look in his eyes, when the Dai Li agent — What was his name? Had he given it up? Zuko couldn't even remember anymore — fell paralyzed by the lash of Nyla's tongue. His face had still been hard with determination then, but in the light of the flame Zuko held, his eyes betrayed him. He knew he was going to die. And he knew that it wouldn't be quick.

That was all he would admit for a long time, but June's desperation made her persistent, and she made Zuko persist. This man was their only lead to the Dai Li who held June's father, and she would extract a location from him by any means at her disposal … or Zuko's.

Her whip had flayed his exposed back to bloody ribbons by the time she demanded Zuko do more than simply string him up and question him, while June applied persuasion. Her patience had worn thin as his lacerated hide by the time she demanded Zuko burn him.

Zuko refused, of course — he hadn't wanted to torture the man in the first place — until June made the disturbing point that this was exactly what his sister could expect, if she handed Azula over to the Earth Kingdom. The ultimatum was clear, but in the end, he couldn't meet it.

The shirsu venom didn't prevent their captive from feeling pain. And the stoic grunts and hisses with which he took his early lashes had since degenerated into bloodcurdling screams that Zuko knew would haunt him for the rest of his life. The Dai Li didn't scream when Zuko walked up to him with flame in hand though.

He begged.

Tears mingled with the blood that streaked his face from some of June's more poorly aimed lashes. Snot ran from his nose and he shook visibly when he begged Zuko to make it stop. When he begged Zuko to make an end.

Something broke in him then, and Zuko couldn't think of what Azula needed or what June needed, or his honor or everything else at stake. Something broke in him when he could only think of a hand wreathed in flame, reaching for him. He ran from the cave and June's shouted reproach, and emptied his stomach in the bushes outside.

He wished he could empty his mind half so easily. He wished he could forget.

_He brought it on himself_, Zuko argued internally. _He would have blackmailed me, hunted my sister down like an animal. He wouldn't flinch from torturing her, even killing her if he was ordered_.

The Dai Li had so far refused to say where June's father was held. But her whip had loosened his tongue, and he told them other things. That he worked as an orderly at the asylum from the time Azula was committed, foremost among them. His partner was still in place there, in case the princess should return.

Zuko should have guessed there would be two. Dai Li rarely worked alone, the capacity for independent thought was stamped out of them too thoroughly. He would have to write the asylum staff, the captain of his palace guard, his director of intelligence, _someone_ to take care of the other Dai Li. Maybe when his hands stopped shaking.

He felt sick all over again just thinking about how close they got to Azula. And Zuko considered for the first time what might have happened, if she had not run from the asylum. If the Earth Kingdom grew impatient in their thwarted efforts to bring her to trial, and sought other avenues for revenge. It would have been appallingly easy to make her death look like a suicide, an accidental overdose, a bad reaction to her medication…

He wondered if Azula knew, or suspected, that she was in the care of her enemies when she decided to run. _Of course she did_, he quickly concluded. She had an instinct for these things. The only time she hadn't seen it coming was when her friends betrayed her.

And when Zuko left to join Aang in ending the war, if her converse with absent fathers was to be believed —

A swift kick to his injured ribs sent Zuko sprawling from his seat on the forest floor with a sharply indrawn breath, before he even realized June had emerged from the cave. "Get up, Useless," she spoke callously, indifferent to his discomfort with whip clutched in hand. "I have the place, no thanks to you. It's time to move out."

She matched his glare when Zuko climbed to his knees then clambered to his feet, clutching his side in silent reproach to watch her through a red haze of pain and growing hatred. "Let's hope you prove less squeamish when someone's out to kill you," June added for good measure, letting the coil of her whip fall loose to the ground as if she would test him right now. "Or it'll be both our funerals when we get there."

"What happened to —" He left the thought unfinished, but June didn't need to ask.

"Dead," she grunted, moving to untie Nyla's reins from the tree she bound him to. "His reward for telling me what I needed."

"You shouldn't have tortured him," Zuko said, sick at heart. "Whatever he's done, it was still wrong."

"Who said anything about right and wrong?" June snapped, turning to face him with a toss of her hair and arms crossed in challenge. The shirsu paced behind her, restless. "It was **necessary**. You head one of the most powerful nations in the world, don't you _know_ what that is?"

"I know where to draw the line!" Zuko insisted, spreading the fingers of his outstretched hand. "He was _helpless_, incapacitated, our prisoner —"

"So was your dad," June pointed out. "Didn't stop you burning him."

Zuko could only stare at first, stricken. "How did — you —"

She shrugged one shoulder, and the snake tattooed on her deltoid seemed to rear at him in unspoken threat. "I have friends in the Fire Nation. Sometimes they pass on rumors to me. Gotta say, I didn't put much stock by that one," June spoke dismissively, refastening the whip to her belt and turning to check the straps that secured Nyla's saddlebags. "When I found out what a pussy you are."

His hands clenched compulsively, and Zuko had to take a deep breath to keep from lashing out. "It wasn't the same," he grit out.

And June snorted with derision. "Sure it wasn't." She didn't even bother to look back.

_He wasn't helpless when he did what he did to Azula_, Zuko justified. But he couldn't bring himself to say it to June, even when her back was turned. It didn't feel right somehow, telling anyone else about the abuse. He wondered if this was how Uncle felt when he found out, and why he didn't say anything. He still should have said something…

Zuko had acted in anger — _You would do it again_, whispered his sister's voice — while June tortured a man in cold blood, and tried to demand he do the same. How many more of her cruelties would he have to witness or take part in, before this was over? He wouldn't even be **working** with her, if he didn't need June to find his sister. If breaking their damned partnership wouldn't just free her up to hunt Azula with impunity.

_You could kill her_, he considered for the first time, and the idea was so alien and disturbing Azula might have suggested it herself. _Remove the threat_.

June chose that moment to glance back, with one foot already in the stirrups while the shirsu crouched to let her up. But she didn't say whatever she had meant to say, when she guessed the train of his thoughts from the look on his face.

June just smiled coldly. She didn't remove her foot from the stirrups, but paused mid-mount, as if displaying her ass to him in some animal show of dominance. Sometimes Zuko thought she was more animal than woman, and didn't know whether to be turned on or disgusted by her antics. He had even wondered once in the long hours he spent riding behind her how Mai would look dressed all in black leather like that. Until a scathing comment from June made it clear she _knew_ what he was wondering.

"So," she spoke casually, her shadowed eyes narrowed in anticipation, "finally occurred to you, did it?"

She took a moment to savor his surprise, before swinging astride the shirsu's back to dig her spiked heels into his fur, and urge Nyla to his feet. "Go ahead and try it," she offered generously, smirking down at Zuko in full awareness of the high ground. "They'll never find your body," she promised lightly."Then who would be left to protect sister dear?"

Something in the way she said it gave Zuko pause. But June jumped in before he could ask, to inform him, "Your secret's out. I might have forgot to mention our mutual friend let that slip, before the end. He got a message to the others. Looks like we should've moved faster."

But her reaction wasn't anything like Zuko had grown to expect, and he found himself wondering if June knew already, just like she picked up on the rumor about Ozai. "You knew —"

"— that you boned her?" June crassly completed the thought. "Yeah, somehow I figured it out between her robe smelling like you and how Nyla reacted to the scent. Animals can sense these things. Turns out I can too." She raised the eyebrow not obscured by her curtain of hair when she looked down on Zuko from the saddle to observe, "Guess now we know why you have problems with women."

"I do **not** have problems with women!" Zuko burst out, incensed, and June rolled her eyes.

"_Sheesh_, it was just a joke," she griped, offering him a hand up into the saddle, the gesture itself communicating her utter certainty that Zuko posed no threat to her. "Grow a sense of humor, why don't you?"

But Zuko hesitated before accepting her offer, disturbed by how lightly she took the revelation of his crime. "It doesn't bother you?" he asked her, while the bounty hunter helped him up with an ease that spoke to freakish strength.

"Why would it?" June grunted, pulling him up. "I don't have any siblings." She paused, and looked uncharacteristically thoughtful, while Zuko found his seat behind her. "That I know of, anyway."

And she pulled out her whip and struck the dirt at their feet with an ear-splitting crack that launched the shirsu into motion, before Zuko could even ask what she meant.

* * *

Mai sat still as ever she'd been trained, even with no one to watch her. The light of the paper lamp on the bloodwood desk in her husband's study guttered as the taper burned low. But Mai didn't bother calling either of the imperial firebenders standing just outside the door to replace it.

She'd already read Ty Lee's letter, more than once. Reading it again would not make her pleas on behalf of Azula any more compelling. Reading it again would do nothing to ease the slow burn of resentment in the pit of Mai's stomach, she knew.

She managed to stare at the scroll lying open on the cluttered desk for a solid half-minute before Mai reached reflexively for one of her hidden knives. Her bandaged right hand fumbled in gripping it, when searing pain shot through the gashes scored in her palm and fingers. Mai cursed when the knife fell at her feet, and kicked it away from the chair in a rare display of petulance.

Well, she thought bitterly, wasn't she entitled? It was a lot smarter to do this alone in the silence of an empty study, than in front of her guards. But that chance was lost, along with her accustomed self-control.

She hadn't seen this coming. That a man so endearingly awkward and painfully sincere would betray her with anyone, let alone his manipulative bitch of a sister, was a permissible source of surprise. That Azula would take fullest advantage of his lapse was not.

She should have seen this coming. As soon as she knew what — She should have guessed.

Mai bent her head and gripped her bandaged hand, to draw a deep breath against the grief that welled inside her like an aching void. A void that demanded how he could do this, how he could still defend her, how he could think she didn't plan this, why —

Even if there were answers to these questions that would satisfy — and there weren't — it wouldn't change what he did. Or guard against the consequences. One of them had to look out for Lu Ten, and his birthright. Increasingly, it seemed that would be left to Mai…

She looked up when the door swung inward, to admit the warden of the Boiling Rock. It was obvious her uncle left in haste, as he didn't usually arrive in the capital still dressed in his prison uniform. The leather skirt hardly flattered either his skinny legs or his pot belly, and Tsutomu was quite vain enough to know it. The sight of him was enough to bring a lump to her throat though, and Mai could not speak him a word in greeting.

"Mai?" her uncle said uncertainly, vaguely uncomfortable as he always appeared in such upscale surroundings as the palace, or even her parents' house. "You sent for me?" He approached to look more closely at her. "What's wrong?"

"She's pregnant," Mai said without preamble, speaking with a calm she didn't feel.

"Who?" her uncle asked blankly, his brow furrowed.

"His sister."

And Mai felt a rush of ruthless satisfaction, upon seeing the warden back into the desk adjacent to her, revulsion etched in every line of his aging face. It wasn't just her. Zuko tried to act like this was a terrible but legitimate mistake, like it was at all comparable to anything he'd done wrong before. But her uncle knew. He knew it was an abomination.

"_What?_" Tsutomu spat, and his heavy lips twisted with disgust.

"I had it from Ty Lee," Mai spoke flatly, suddenly weary. "She saw Azula about a month ago."

"This is monstrous," her uncle pronounced grimly, pushing off from the desk to draw nearer. His narrow eyes lit with a sudden idea, and he added, "You're sure he's the father?"

"I'm not sure of anything anymore," Mai said, and this was truer than even the warden knew. "But I know he'll think so. And in the end, it's his opinion that matters." _Not mine_.

This was not the first time the possibility had occurred to her, of course. And she knew perfectly well Azula would be capable of that level of deception. This wasn't the first time she thought about it. It didn't make it any easier to think about…

Mai still remembered his quiet desperation, the urgency of his questing mouth, how his fingers traced fire on her skin, when Zuko lay with her the night before the eclipse. She had thought at the time that he was just worried about the loss of his bending on the morrow, for the invasion Azula warned was coming. He had breathed not a word of his intent to her, and she never knew he meant to defect until he did.

That was not the first time Mai gave herself to him, nor the second or the third. They were never very careful back then. It was sheer luck he hadn't got her with child before he left, at least, that was what she thought at the time. But they took no precautions throughout their engagement either, and this stretched long enough that she began to wonder whether Zuko waited to see if she _could_ give him a child.

But then she would remind herself that this was Zuko, and he was not that subtle. And she had not had to wonder for long, before Lu Ten afflicted her with mother's stomach, and Zuko took her hastily to wife. Two years spent warming his bed had finally gained her a son. And she was supposed to believe one night with Azula accomplished the same.

It was patently unfair, Mai thought. But that just made it likelier to be true.

"What will you do?" her uncle was asking. She forced herself to focus on the conversation at hand, and didn't entirely succeed.

"Funny thing," Mai whispered harshly, looking away to hide the frown that creased her brow, "her medical records have gone missing." She didn't like it. It was the one piece of the puzzle that didn't fit, not the least when Azula had been institutionalized for the past four years.

"Her records?" Tsutomu echoed in question, and Mai lifted her head to meet his gaze, where her uncle stood before the desk with hands clasped behind his back.

"Supposedly she almost died in the asylum," Mai explained, her words ringing strangely hollow to her own ears. "Her doctors said she would never fully recover.

"I wanted to know if I could reasonably expect this to kill her." She tried to imagine the princess bleeding out, that she might die screaming in the same agony Mai endured when Lu Ten was born — and couldn't. But there would be time enough to consider why later. Right now, she had plans to make.

Her uncle arched a skeptical brow, frowning at her passivity. "You really think you'll get that lucky?"

"It doesn't matter what I think," Mai spoke softly, the ring of steel beneath her words. "Only what other people will think."

A grim smile touched his lips, and Mai knew he understood.

"Zuko is irrationally protective of her," she elaborated, her hands clenching where she folded them neatly in her lap. "If I tried to move against her directly —" Mai drew a deep breath, "— there is a good chance he would put me aside."

His blunt features clouded with anger at this, but then Tsutomu dropped his formal stance to approach her side. "What happened to your hand?" he demanded abruptly, his eyes grown wide with concern when he spied the bandages she had hidden beneath a trailing sleeve.

Mai put her hand in his offered palm without hesitation. A reflex born of the first months she spent training with knives under his tutelage, when he had often to tend nicks and cuts gained in her practice. When Mai showed no signs of firebending by her fifth birthday, it was her Uncle Tom who first put a blade in her hand, and offered his home for the summer, so she might learn to use it.

"It was an accident," she spoke tightly, feeling suddenly very small and intolerably foolish. "It won't happen again."

"I should hope not," her uncle said gruffly, but with the underlying gentleness she learned to hear long ago. "A man like that isn't worth hurting yourself over."

He laid his heavy hand on her head, the way he used to do when she was a little girl. Something caught in her throat, and before she even meant to, Mai was hugging him tightly round his thick and yielding waist.

Her uncle didn't say anything about the silent tears that soaked his shirt front or the flame headpiece that poked into his stomach, just leaned into her awkward hug, his bare arms closing around her shoulders until she managed to draw back with a deep breath and an equally shaky smile.

"Thanks," Mai spoke huskily, sitting up straight to wipe away the tracks of tears on her cheeks.

"For what?" Tsutomu let his arms fall to his sides. Mai looked up at him through red-rimmed eyes.

"For being here," she whispered, as if speaking too loudly might shatter this tenuous peace. "For — not saying 'I told you so'."

His jowls twitched into something that might be a grimace. "If it's any consolation," he spoke doubtfully, as if it probably wouldn't be, "I never thought it would be his sister."

Mai barked out a bitter laugh. "That makes two of us."

But her uncle seemed lost in his own thoughts. He crossed his arms and gripped his square chin to add darkly, "That whole family is _corrupt_. They have been since the time of Fire Lord Sozin."

"Careful," Mai corrected him without feeling. Rising from her chair, she walked past him to take Ty Lee's scroll from the desk, and roll it up again. "My son is one of them."

"He doesn't have to be," Tsutomu contradicted quietly, and Mai looked across at him in the soft fall of lamplight, the scroll and ribbon in her hands both forgotten. Her uncle seemed to be working up to something. "If he were raised right, away from that influence…"

Her stomach jolted unpleasantly. The possibility hit too close to fears she nursed as recently as the night Azula escaped. "Zuko would never bear to be parted from his son," was all she could manage in reply. Mai retied the ribbon as she spoke, looking away from her uncle.

"It wouldn't have to be his choice," the warden said slowly, as if gauging her reaction. "If he were to suffer some accident —"

And Mai crushed the scroll, with a grip like the cruel hand that closed around her heart when she thought of him dead, when she thought of — her heart — "You're speaking treason," she said harshly, drawing herself up to her full height. But the word had no visible effect on her uncle.

"Niece," he spoke gravely, looking remarkably serious even for him, "where is he now?"

Mai stopped, staring. What was this? Did he actually mean to — _No_, she thought firmly, tucking the scroll away inside her sleeve. She could trust him. Her uncle had proven that much. "He's working with a bounty hunter to track Azula. Why?" she added, almost defiantly.

The warden hesitated at this, before he asked, "May I speak frankly?"

"I think we've established you can," was her sardonic reply.

His eyes gleamed sadly, when Tsutomu admitted, "There are rumors he's abandoned you. Some say for your circus friend, that Ty Lee, others for this bounty hunter ... Jin?"

"June," Mai corrected flatly, resuming her seat with a tired exhalation. "And did you think this is anything I haven't heard before? I'm Zuko's spymaster as well as his wife," she reminded him, reaching up to massage her temples with the tips of her fingers. "There's no more truth to these stories than any of the rumors that surround him." _Or me_.

"You're certain?" the warden said quietly, pursing his lips.

And Mai glared at him. So that would be the way of it? "Ty Lee is an incurable flirt," she told him, just like she'd told her parents. "But she would never betray a friend that way." _Even if Zuko could stand her_, she added silently.

"And this bounty hunter he ran off with?" her uncle said, scowling.

"A binge-drinking, arm-wrestling, mercenary bitch?" Mai countered impatiently. "He despises women like that." And she tried to ignore that he despised Azula once too. It didn't bear thinking about.

Tsutomu finally picked up on her tone, at least. "I don't ask to cause you pain," her uncle explained, sitting on his heels beside her to be more nearly at eye level, resting a hand on the back of her chair. "Just to understand, and —" his nostrils flared, "— to put you on your guard."

His sympathy hardened to open suspicion when he warned, "There's no reason to think he wouldn't cheat again, if he could betray you once…"

Mai glanced down at the unspoken question, her eyes tearing despite herself. "Azula was the first time — he —" She pressed her lips tightly together against a sound less articulate, and looked over to read the doubt in her uncle's eyes. As if he thought she was some fool girl, who would believe anything her husband said without question.

"I **know**," Mai insisted, gripping the arms of her chair before she realized she would then have to admit _how_ she knew. "I checked after — after I found out," she spoke painfully, and the warden frowned.

"You had him followed?" he questioned, and Mai scoffed. She respected her uncle a great deal, but the suggestion was so ridiculous she couldn't help it.

"What would be the point?" she said flatly. "He's the Fire Lord. He's surrounded by guards and servants and court officials nearly every hour of the day." Mai stood quickly, and walked across the carpet to turn her back to him. It still shamed her too much to look the warden in the face, when she confessed, "I questioned them, discreetly. I doubt anyone realized what I was about. But I learned what I needed.

"There was no one before her," Mai lifted her chin, and turned to face the warden when he climbed to his feet. "And if you could see the depth of his remorse —" Mai recalled her Lord husband kneeling before her in the darkness of her shuttered bedroom, and willed herself to believe it, "— you would know there will be no one after."

Tsutomu seemed to consider his words, before replying. "I hope you're right. For your sake, as much as the boy's." His brow furrowed when he gripped the back of her vacant chair. "And I hope you can trust the report of these servants —"

Mai raised her bandaged hand to forestall him. "I run his household," she said. "They're loyal to me before Zuko."

He tilted his head as if with some insight, but then hesitated to voice it. And suddenly, Mai found it all too much. "_Stop_ thinking it," she ordered sternly.

And the warden recoiled with surprise, before his face fell in understanding. "My niece," he said formally, approaching only to stop at arm's length and hold out his hand. "You know I would never act without your consent, don't you?" She nodded reluctantly, took his offered hand in her uninjured one.

"If this choice should belong to anyone, it should belong to _you_," her uncle said firmly, as if it were any choice at all. As if it had ever been.

He squeezed her hand in reassurance, smiled sadly. "I only want to serve you," he affirmed, "in this and in everything. I only want your happiness."

"I _know_," Mai whispered bitterly, and bent her head. "I know."

* * *

Azula should have known something was wrong, when Fong's men broke off their pursuit at the edges of the swamp. Granted, that was rather the point of her little detour. To force the earthbenders onto unfavorable ground, where their element lay beneath waist-deep standing water, and Azula could find more places to hide.

The unfortunate ostrich horse had broken its leg in their headlong flight down the mountainside, throwing Azula from its back. She tucked and rolled to avoid breaking her neck, but was left with no choice but to kill her crippled mount, silencing its distressed squawking with a fire dagger to the throat.

_This wouldn't have happened to an eel hound_, she thought bitterly, grabbing the smallest of the packs that held her lighter clothes and remaining food to continue fleeing on foot. _Or probably even a mongoose dragon_. But the sandbender tribes she hoped to trade with had never shown themselves, and with limited food and water, Azula could not seek them out.

Instead, she had stuck to the north face of the mountains, careful to keep them always in sight as she made her way back to the west coast of the Earth Kingdom, across the sands of the Si Wong by night. She pushed herself and her mount as hard as she could, reflecting resentfully that this schedule had never exacted such a physical toll when she still trained in the asylum. Before she fell pregnant. In the end, it was her dwindling water supply that had forced Azula back across the mountains and into more populated territory.

Her famous luck held out just long enough for Azula to acclimate to travel by daylight again, when some twenty Earth Kingdom soldiers discovered her refilling her waterskins from a rushing mountain stream. Her famous luck held out further when they showed up on the other side of the river and _after_ she had managed her first bath in over a week. Azula wrinkled her nose now in disgust, when she plunged into the trees and knee-deep standing water. Any longer without a wash, and she could have weaponized the smell.

The flying boulders, hails of sharp-edged stones, and occasional upthrust column of rock followed her some distance into the twilit gloom beneath the canopy, but Azula knew when the attacks began to fall short and then ceased entirely that her pursuers must have stopped at the tree line. It was just as obvious that the swamp had deterred them and not Azula herself. Being hemmed in by wood, even damp and moss-hung as it was, prevented her from throwing fire over her shoulder as she had done when fleeing earlier.

She stopped her clumsy progress through stagnant water tinged a murky green, and listened carefully for a few seconds to confirm. The water rose to mid-thigh now, but Azula was soaked up to her armpits from the haste of her flight. The ambient noise of whatever disgusting creatures dwelt here had died off with her arrival, and the bent earth in her wake. Hearing no sounds of pursuit in the silence of the swamp, she decided to climb a tree to try to spot the earthbenders, and consider her next move.

That they had recognized Azula was made readily apparent by their shouted threats and promises of retribution. She rolled her eyes thinking of it even now, climbing hand over foot up the vine-choked trunk of a giant tree and considering the special brand of idiocy it took to advertise intentions in a fight. Neither did it take much thought to realize this squad — and others like it, no doubt — was specifically searching for her. With the exception of special forces like Ba Sing Se's Terra Team, benders tended to be well-integrated with nonbenders in Earth Kingdom armies.

That this detachment was made up entirely of earthbenders, patrolling the mountain passes twenty strong in peace time, clearly indicated they were expecting her. An unfortunate consequence of crossing the same path she took to Kyoshi Island. But with the only other avatar shrine all the way across the continent, in the remotest reaches of the mountains north of Ba Sing Se, Azula was left with little other choice but to trek back up the Kolau Mountains to its nearer counterpart.

Winded and a little dizzy from her exertion, Azula stopped about a third of the way up and climbed out onto a sturdy branch, straddling the tree limb to lean back against the trunk behind her. Her sopping backpack squelched wetly when she put her weight on it, and Azula wondered if she shouldn't have just left it in the muck below. The pack felt like it had taken on twice its weight in water, and everything inside was probably ruined anyway.

She sighed fit to rival Mai, and considered that the gloomy noblewoman would never have found herself in this situation. If for no other reason than because Mai would give herself up for capture, before setting foot in a such a filthy mire as this swamp. _Funny_, Azula thought a little bitterly and sat forward on the limb, squinting through the obstruction of further leaves and branches to try to make out the forms of her pursuers, _you never minded getting your hands dirty except in the most literal sense. Yet it was _you_ and not Ty Lee who finally suffered a crisis of conscience_ —

"Well, forgive me if I didn't want his blood on my hands," Mai flatly replied, and Azula cried out in alarm.

She twisted quickly to sight the source of the sound, too quickly, so that her waterlogged backpack dragged her off the branch. "I only _loved_ him, after all," the phantom spoke coldly, uncaring of her pained gasp when Azula arrested her fall by wrapping her legs tightly around the tree limb — only for the strap of her backpack to nearly dislocate her left shoulder, before the damned thing tore free to tumble to the stagnant water below, disgorging her food and clothing as it fell.

"But what would that matter to someone like you?" said the shape Azula just glimpsed over her shoulder and past the hanging curtain of her own wet hair. She didn't get a good look before it stepped lightly across the lower branches and around the tree trunk out of her sight, but Azula knew well enough who that sounded like…

_I love Zuko, more than I fear you_. Her false friend was only one of several hallucinations that plagued her while she was imprisoned.

Still hanging upside down from the tree limb, Azula drew a shuddering breath and let it out slowly. She wasn't in the asylum anymore, and she was past this. It had to be just a trick of the dim half-light, the overactive imagination common to such an alien environment as the swamp.

With a quick puff of air to brace herself, Azula swung forward and bent to try to grab the branch she hung from. Her hands fell well short both times she tried it, and she gained no more than a cramp in her stomach for her trouble. Unbelievable! she seethed, clenching her hands against the desire to punch fire at the branch she hung from. She _couldn't even do_ a simple crunch anymore!

She grit her teeth, eyes tearing in frustration when she swung backward instead, releasing the grip of her legs on the tree limb. Azula fell only a short distance before she grabbed hold of the vines that encircled the tree, and brought herself to a halt. Swiping her wet hair angrily away from her face with one hand, Azula looked back over her shoulder to discover she actually enjoyed a better vantage point from farther down the trunk.

She observed two of the earthbenders break off from the knot that had gathered at the threshold of the swamp, skating back up the mountainside under power of their bending. The others split up going either way along the edges of the swamp, leaving only another two standing where she had entered the trees. The ones who split off wouldn't go far, Azula thought, her eyes narrowed. Just within shouting distance. They would surround the swamp as well as they could with their numbers, and wait for reinforcements to arrive.

Would the soldiers try to flush her out then, Azula wondered, or just surround the swamp and cut off her escape? She hardly intended to wait around and find out, but it still would have been good to know why they feared to enter now. This environment might host deadly beasts or hostile primitives, for all she knew. Azula could hardly imagine why anyone would choose to live in this cesspit. But if tribes made a home of the desert, she guessed it was possible someone was ill-advised enough to try that here.

She climbed back down the tree, and resolved to be on her guard. Whatever the unknown variables, there was nothing for it now but to try to beat their reinforcements to the far edge of the swamp. Azula sighed when she dropped the last few feet back into stagnant water, and set about recovering her pack and what clothes and provisions still floated on its surface.

The sun had been on its descent when she entered the swamp, and with its setting came a veritable plague of mosquitos. Azula cursed quietly to herself when she swatted another one from her neck and brought her hand away to find blood on her palm. Her own blood, most likely. There was no shortage of trills and chirps and what even sounded disturbingly like screaming from the birds about, but these probably knew well enough how to evade the mosquitos. Azula, on the other hand, could not even seem kill them before they bit her.

She growled low in her throat when she hoisted the dripping backpack over one shoulder (the other strap had been torn) and considered that maybe she needed to make herself a less tempting target. So Azula devoted part of her concentration to heating the air that touched her skin until it shimmered — and the rest to watching her back as she slogged deeper into the early night that lay at the heart of the swamp.

* * *

The boulder that would have shattered his ribs shattered to gravel instead, with the concussive burst of flame Zuko punched at the nearest Dai Li. He ducked and rolled away from another attack launched by another of the earthbenders, shooting darts of flame at the first one's bare feet to break his root.

Zuko leapt back up just in time to dodge June's whip when this caught his off-balance foe full in the face. He repaid the favor by batting aside a stalagmite the other Dai Li bent at her unprotected back with a roundhouse kick. He followed this up with a second kick that loosed an arc of flame at the underhanded earthbender, and sent his adversary crashing into the cave wall so hard he left a dent in the rock.

The Dai Li June whipped clutched his bleeding face and howled with pain, but Zuko knew he would collapse soon enough, and pose no threat in the meantime. The bounty hunter had coated her whip in shirsu venom before they fought their way into the cave-cum-prison, and though it took longer to work than the genuine article, Zuko had already witnessed it paralyze several of the earthbenders.

Unfortunately, her whip wasn't fast enough to catch the Dai Li who dropped right on top of Zuko, from cover of the dark that clung to the stalactites on the ceiling, despite the weak light of lime-tinged crystals. June was too busy fending off a further two Dai Li, when the earthbender knocked him backwards, pinning Zuko to the floor with a knee in his stomach. His pointed hands forked to raise an earth-spike that would have impaled Zuko, if he hadn't kicked off with a burst of flame, throwing the Dai Li and escaping his pin with a shallow gash to the side instead.

This wasn't the first time in the last few minutes the Dai Li had tried to use lethal force. They must have guessed when he showed up with no one more than June at his back that Zuko wasn't here on official business. And as such, they could not be held officially responsible for his death…

The earthbender gained his feet with a boost from the floor itself, but Zuko used that second to spin in place, sweeping a circle with his feet that loosed a ring of fire. Zuko's adversary was able to raise a rock wall as shield, but had to break off his own attack before he could bring the stalactites overhead down on Zuko, in a hail a spikes. These trembled instead, but a fine dust was all that fell when Zuko flipped upright.

The Dai Li fighting June were not so fortunate. With their backs to Zuko, they didn't see the ring of fire sweep toward them — but June did. Lashing out with another faceshot at one earthbender, June unbalanced him in perfect time for the flames to send him crashing to his back, and almost too fast to follow, flipped over the line of fire and away from the stone fist the second Dai Li shot at her, in a front handspring that would have impressed Ty Lee.

But Zuko could barely attend to the lash of her whip finding a fresh target, when his own Dai Li began punching sections of the rock wall at him, putting him on the defensive. There were too many projectiles for Zuko to deflect them all with either flame, fists, or feet, and he was being driven steadily back — probably to nothing good. So he took the next opportunity to dive behind the cover of a rock pile and ignite whips of fire in his hands.

Surging to his feet, Zuko aimed these at the stalactites overhead weakened by the earthbender's abortive attack, and thought, _Let him see how he likes it_. Neither was he idle while the Dai Li bent the falling spikes aside, but took the opportunity to leap from cover, locking his arms while he spun, ducked, and twisted through the first forms of the Dancing Dragon kata. The concussive burst of flame he unleashed pulverized what remained of the rock wall and knocked his foe unconscious —

Just in time for him to join June in harrying their last opponent. Zuko distracted him with two fireballs to face and feet, respectively, while June struck at him from behind. He managed to block the fire with a rock wall that crumbled under the assault, and dodge the whip once, though he wasn't as lucky a second time. Zuko's next kick pushed him right toward June, who stepped deftly to the side and lashed the earthbender on his way past.

The Dai Li fell sprawling, shuddered, tried to pick himself up. But June kicked him swiftly in the face, breaking his nose in a bright spray of blood, and the earthbender rolled away with a wet-sounding groan. June winked at a nauseated Zuko, practically grinning when she said, "C'mon, Pouty. I think our work here's almost done."

Zuko ran after her down a crystal-lit passage, but quickly fell behind when he took the time to duck his head into alcoves and side passages that might hold June's father's cell — and June didn't. "Hey!" he yelled after her, sprinting to catch up. "Why aren't you checking?"

"No guards!" June yelled over her shoulder, running round a bend in the passageway. And Zuko cursed their luck. Some Dai Li agents must have smuggled her father out while June and Zuko fought the rest! They would have to begin their search all over again, and Zuko had a sneaking suspicion he knew just how June would start looking…

So it was that he was quite surprised, on following June down another turn in the path bent into the rock, to emerge in the orange light of sunset near the edge of the autumn wood they traveled to get here — and find two Dai Li agents slumped together paralyzed at the clawed feet of their ostrich horses, their eyes wide and darting about with fear. A short-statured man who looked to be in his early sixties stood to the side of them near some straggly bushes, trying to unlock his handcuffs with limited success while Nyla sniffed at his balding hair.

"Dad?" June cried, and light caught on his glasses when the man looked up.

"Junebug!" His seamed, squarish face lit up with a smile when June threw her arms around his neck, though he had to hold his cuffed hands awkwardly to the side. "What took you so long?" her father laughed, while June stepped back and took the key from him to unlock his cuffs.

"Dead weight," she grunted, forking a thumb at Zuko before she unlocked the first cuff.

His eyes grew round on spotting Zuko standing near the entrance to the cave, "Is that … _the Fire Lord?_"

"Don't remind him." June rolled her eyes, loosing the second cuff to cast them at his feet. "He certainly never forgets."

"I'm sorry, but how did this even _happen?_" Zuko finally demanded, gesturing to the paralyzed Dai Li and the stalking shirsu. "You said you'd leave Nyla in the woods; he couldn't fight as well in close quarters." The entrance to the prison had been too small to fit the beast, but Zuko found it a little suspect even then that an animal as mole-like as the shirsu couldn't handle itself underground.

June crossed her arms in nonchalance, admitting coolly, "Yeah, I might have scouted for back exits and means of transport while you watched the front. And left Nyla here to take out any runners. I knew he wouldn't attack my dad; he knows him."

"A remarkable beast," her father put in, stroking the shirsu's ugly snout when it nuzzled his hand. "My June trained him well."

"_You_ trained me well," June said quietly, bumping his shoulder.

Zuko fought a rising tide of frustration. "And you didn't feel the need to tell me this _why?_"

June shrugged her scraped shoulder. "Sorry, kid. Nothing personal, but you weren't battle-tested." Zuko blinked once, scowling, and she explained, "This way if you got caught, you couldn't tell them just where to find me."

Zuko ignored the insulting implication that he would inform on an ally, and zeroed in on a broader concern. "And if I got caught," he continued darkly, "you'd come back and get me, _right?_"

June smirked at his tone. "Sure I would. With your army at my back. You're a very important person, after all," she pointed out snidely, inclining her head. "That's why you have them."

But seeing his offense, June snorted to break the tension. "Lighten up, Pouty," she spoke dismissively, climbing into the shirsu's saddle to offer her father a hand-up "'Course I'd break you out. Like I'd leave your royal ass stranded in enemy territory? Not if I want to live long."

"Speaking of royals," Zuko grit out, accepting the hand her father offered to help him up into the saddle. He swung his leg over the shirsu's back as it broke into a trot that carried them into the trees. "It's time to deliver on your promise."

June looked over her left shoulder at him in the falling dark, followed by her father. The contrast between their features, and between her flawless ivory skin and the tanned leather of his, was really quite striking in profile. "I'm sorry, what promise is that?" June asked innocently, refusing to give him an inch.

Zuko sighed. "To find my _sister_."

"Oh right," June spoke casually, tugging lightly on the reins to slow Nyla to a stop, "I'll just need a scent sample." Zuko blinked, and June arched an eyebrow back at him. "You did bring a scent sample, _right?_"

He bristled at her tone. "I didn't exactly know I'd be _hiring_ you when I came to Kyoshi Island, alright?" Zuko defended, but felt no less foolish for saying it. "Can't it just … remember what her robe smelled like?" he said hopelessly, recalling the robe had burned to ashes at his own hand.

"Maybe," June said doubtfully, cast half in shadow by a nearby tree trunk that blocked the dying light. "But you'll recall the robe led Nyla straight to _you_ last time. I'd suggest a new sample. Something only she's touched recently."

Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking hard. The asylum was out, he knew, because the uniforms were standard issue, and hers would simply have been washed and put back in circulation after her escape. Likewise Kyoshi Island, even if it was closer. Ty Lee didn't want him tracking her in the first place, and probably hid or destroyed anything of Azula's to prevent him.

The Dai Li got her robe from the beach house, but it wouldn't have been the only thing Azula touched. Her hair was wet, he remembered, and she would have had to brush it out after she washed it. She wore makeup too, lipstick and eyeliner. Any of these articles should have her scent on them —

He laid a hand over his eyes and his mouth bent with a swift stab of remorse, when Zuko remembered waking from his madness to find her broken entirely. The tears that ran black down the sides of her face. How her eyes stared at nothing. Her lips moved silently, forming the same word over and over again. He knew what word she spoke now, two months too late…

_I used her no more kindly than him_.

"Fire Lord," June's father spoke back at him, "are you alright?" Zuko let down his hand.

"Fine," he lied flatly. "I know where we can get a sample, my family's beach house on Ember Island." He drew a deep breath. "If the Dai Li have looted it, we'll try the palace instead."

June nodded professionally, a calculating gleam in her eye. "To the colonies then?"

Zuko nodded. "Then to Ember Island."

Then to make amends, the only way he had left.

* * *

"No one ever accused you of lacking direction," Mai sighed over her shoulder. "Even if it was the wrong one." And Azula muttered a curse against phantoms that appeared in perfect time to make her lose her compass, and everything else solid enough to sink to the bottom of the swamp.

Several hours into her miserable trek through stagnant water strewn with lily pads and rife with hidden roots and sinkholes to trip her up, it had become quite clear the hallucination was no trick of the light. The light had gone along with the sun, and Mai had come back to bother her multiple times since then. Azula didn't bother glancing back into the misty dark, knowing the thing would almost certainly vanish as soon as she looked too close, just like the times before. _Strange that the hallucinations at the asylum never did that_.

That would only be a temporary solution though. And it was almost worse having to wonder when the thing would come back — for it kept to no schedule Azula could tell — than having to listen to it talk. _The real Mai was never this chatty_, she thought irritably, rubbing the heel of one hand in her itching eye, while the other pushed aside some cattails. Even the hallucination would simply sit in a corner of her padded cell more often than not, idly twirling its knives and observing her in silence.

"You ever think maybe I didn't say much, 'cause I knew you didn't _care_ what I had to say?" Mai put in, responding as readily as if Azula had spoken aloud. That much at least was familiar, even if she was no closer to figuring out why her hallucinations had grown worse. Or how she was going to make it stop this time…

"Right, 'I didn't care'," Azula bit out sarcastically, too bone-tired and aching to hold back any longer. "That's why I asked for your council so many times." _I trusted you_, she thought bitterly, slogging faster though the black water. As much as it was ever smart to trust anyone, she trusted Mai.

She knew the gloomy noblewoman had some foolish infatuation with her brother. How could she not, when the otherwise level-headed Mai was so pathetically obvious about it? Azula had used that affection to her own gain, but in the end, she still expected Mai to be smart enough to act in her own self-interest. She never would have brought Mai along to the Boiling Rock (tip from her prison warden uncle or no) or given her first crack at Zuko, if she had any doubt of the outcome.

"You asked me to stand by and let him be killed," Mai's voice accused behind her. "The man I loved…" And Azula did turn to face her — _it_ — so quickly she stumbled, shivering with rage. The hallucination just watched her from a few yards away, looking exactly as Mai did the last time Azula saw her on the gondola platform. Its arms crossed and no ripples formed where it joined the water.

"_He was a traitor!_" Azula screeched in disbelief, her fists clenched so hard she could feel every bone in her hand. "He **betrayed you** just as much as me! And you still _chose_ him!" Her voice broke. _I was your friend first. He wasn't anything to you anymore. He ended it in a letter, too much of a coward to tell you to your face_.

He hadn't even left _her_ a letter, or any warning of what to expect, the next time she was called before their father…

"Of course I did," the hallucination spoke slowly, as if this should be obvious. "What was your so-called friendship compared to his love? He was the love of my life, and you —" Azula turned in anger from the hallucination, but still couldn't help hearing, "You were a _monster_."

Her left fist punched the thick root of a tree in a burst of blue flame, so hard that she skinned her knuckles, and Azula cried out in pain. She drew several deep, shuddering breaths, clutched her bleeding hand and tried not to cry. She waited for her racing heart to calm and the adrenaline to leave her system, with no more sounds around her now than the songs of night birds and the rhythmic _buzz_ of cricket wasps. The thing had gone.

Stupid to get upset over anything it said, she chided herself. The hallucinations had said worse things in their time. And didn't Azula think that about herself every day? What matter if she had to hear it from a construct of her own broken mind?

Even if she shouldn't even be seeing Mai anymore. Even if she banished her…

The hallucination was right about one thing though, Azula admitted. She had no idea of her own direction. Moonlight barely penetrated the canopy of leaves overhead. The stars were obscured entirely, leaving her no way to navigate. Her muscles practically vibrated with fatigue, and Azula considered it might be smarter to find some dry patch of ground to sleep for a few hours, then use the sun's light to find her way in the morning.

It took her what felt like a long time to find a suitable spot, an enormous hollowed out tree stump held up over the water by its arcing roots, like some misshapen spire atop a moss-hung dome. Azula was so tired by that time that she actually lost her footing and slid off the first root she tried to climb, and had to start over again.

She cut some kindling from the rotting stump with the knife in her boot, then pried this off along with the other and both her socks, to avoid trench foot. Azula cleared dead leaves and twigs from some of the packed earth retained along with the exposed roots, stuffing the refuse together with her kindling to start a fire. She wanted nothing more than to lay down beside it and sleep, but her stomach rumbled loudly then, reminding her she hadn't eaten since the morning.

Azula rummaged through her pack for what food she managed to recover. All of it was waterlogged and none looked particularly appetizing. She finally settled on some salted _rougan_, hoping that would prove a little less permeable, and speared this with the straightest stick she could find to heat it over the fire.

Heating didn't help either the bland taste or the texture, and she hadn't even finished the second of the two pieces before she staggered to the edge of her lonely island and threw them both up. She tried to choke down a few clumps of soggy, swollen rice instead, with no better result. It probably didn't help that the grains looked like maggots.

She had to crawl back to the fire after the second time she was sick, and didn't have the energy to try eating again after that. Azula settled instead for downing most of the lukewarm water in her waterskin, stopping only when she reminded herself she would have nothing but swamp water to drink henceforth. At least it succeeded in washing the sour taste from her mouth.

Azula put aside the waterskin and sat facing the flames, held her drawn knees to her chest, and shivered, too cold and tired even to scratch at her mosquito bites anymore. No matter how close she sat to the fire, she couldn't seem to get warm…

She was a firebender, she shouldn't need a fire to keep warm. If she couldn't even rely on her bending out here, then she would be just as helpless as Ty Lee or —

Azula lifted her chin from where she rested it on her knee, to see the hallucination sitting similarly across the small fire from her, clad in the same modest shawl and unflattering skirt Mai had worn that night they all sat around the fire at Ember Island. The flames cast a shadow across her high cheekbones, and lent an unaccustomed warmth to her colorless face. But her eyes were still cold as ever.

"You have a lot of nerve blaming me for what happened," it said flatly, talking about the betrayal at the Boiling Rock again, she didn't doubt. "You trusted me, as much as it was smart to trust anyone? You trusted me to act in my own self-interest?" Mai echoed, as if she'd been thinking about what Azula said — _thought_ — this entire time.

"You don't know what trust is, any more than you know what love is," the hallucination spoke matter-of-factly, and climbed to its feet to look down on her. "You never respected me, or my boundaries, or anything that was mine," Mai persisted, walking around the fire with the slow grace of a predator stalking its prey.

"Why else would you seduce him?"

"I didn't —" Azula flushed with shame, looked away before she could remember herself. "I didn't — mean for it to go that far." The words tumbled from her mouth in barely checked haste.

Her mother _not her mother_ never talked about it, and Azula hadn't thought what she would say. She shouldn't even be saying anything, she didn't talk to it _wasn't that her rule?_

Azula drew a deep breath to keep from screaming. "I … miscalculated," she admitted painfully, staring into the flames, for they were surely less searing than Mai's glare. She recalled how neatly she trapped Zuko in the beach house. _So predictable_, she thought then, never guessing that this time she was tempting fate.

If only he hadn't pulled away at the last second, she could have stabbed a pressure point that would take out his dominant hand, and paralyzed his other arm with one of the handful of _chi_-blocking jabs Ty Lee had taught her. Her brother always proved more reasonable when soundly incapacitated, and they might have ended things peaceably.

Instead he hit her, threw her into the bedside table. When she sprained her ankle, there was no way left to run…

"It was meant for a distraction," Azula spoke, shivering. "That's all." She lifted her head to regard Mai, when the hallucination sat again with legs folded neatly beside it, and leaned back to prop itself on its arms.

"No," it said simply, and stared back unblinking. "You were just doing what you always do. Find a weakness. Exploit it," the thing spoke without emotion. "How did it feel when he did that to you?"

Azula stayed silent. She already knew how it felt. This empty imitation didn't need to know.

"You know that's the real reason you hate me so much," Mai volunteered, as if determined four years after their trip to Ember Island to lay bare her fears and insecurities. "Not in the name of some non-existent friendship. Not because I betrayed you. But because I played the game better than you. And you lost."

Azula didn't reply right away. She rested her chin on her clasped arms, and stared into the fire until its core burned blue. "I haven't lost until I'm dead," she finally spoke into the flames.

Silence was her only answer.

She put out the fire with a motion of her hand, uncaring whether the hallucination returned in the dark. She crawled into the partial shelter of the hollowed out tree trunk, and shut her eyes to sleep.

She dreamed of her father.

When Zuko was banished, she became the crown princess, and her preparation for the throne began in earnest. Her lessons at the academy were only a sideline to what her father taught her then. He was the Fire Lord, but he still found time to meet with her nearly every day, to instruct her by question, example, and challenge in all the aspects of statecraft and history, military tactics, psychology, arts martial and otherwise that she must needs master to succeed him.

He kept her so busy, she hardly noticed her brother's absence. She didn't miss him. He would only have ruined her happiness. Hung about them with that sullen expression on his face, or made a fool of himself in one of his ill-conceived bids for attention. It had been a source of amusement once, but they were not children anymore. She had tried to tell him that wasn't how it worked, but he would never listen. That was why he was gone now, and she would never see him again.

She didn't miss him.

Sometimes she wondered though, what he would think of the new ways Dad trained her. She could never tell Zuko, of course. He was one of those people her father said would never understand. He wasn't like her, or Father. Willing to do whatever it took to succeed, to survive.

He would never realize that people will use anything against you, unless they are too afraid of your doing the same. He never saw his own peril, until it was too late. Sometimes Azula thought he still didn't see it.

Knowing this didn't make her training any easier. Her father said it would hurt the first time, but it didn't only hurt the first time. Sometimes it was hard to know what he wanted, and he was as intolerant of failure in this as in her firebending.

As he should be. It made her strong.

It wasn't always — Sometimes he would stay with her after, and just talk. She liked those times. It made her feel important. It made her feel loved.

She would think later that the hollowed out tree trunk overhead resembled the shadows that gathered beneath her canopy, and that was why she dreamed she lay in her own bed, while Dad sat on the edge bent over her, a warm and solid weight. It was only when she woke screaming to find vines entangled her, that Azula knew why his fingers snaked up her arms, around her throat, between her legs, behind her back…

Half-blinded by tears and the glare of sunlight off the water, she swung fire daggers so wildly she singed her clothes until the vines released their hold, and bolted down one of the bent roots to the water below. Her head pounded, her heart hammered, her joints ached like she took a beating. Her skin burned so hot that steam rose from her body when she hit the water, but Azula wasn't checked in her desperate flight.

The vines lashed out again to snare her as if possessed by some malign intelligence, and Azula managed to blacken much of the surrounding foliage in her furious efforts to fend them off. But she thrashed and stumbled her way through the shallows any time she found an opening, and managed after some indeterminate amount of time to outrun the lethal plant life, tripping to a stop in grayish water that rose only to her calves.

She bent double with hands on her knees, crying and gasping for air. Her lungs burned, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not seem to catch her breath. If she couldn't breathe, she couldn't bend, Azula realized desperately. If that thing came back —

Azula jerked her head up and tried to stand, to look out for the vines, but the moss-hung trees that towered higher than the pillars of the throne room, and the flowers leeched of color that festooned them, only spun. Her legs cramped at the same time as her stomach and she dropped to her knees then onto her hip with a clumsy splash. Azula gripped her middle with one arm and used the other to drag herself inside the small hollow of some roots and grasses that hugged the shallow water, hyperventilating.

She shivered uncontrollably in her partial concealment, mind spinning with the awful realization of her helplessness. If the vines found her again, she wouldn't be able to bend. She couldn't even cut her way free because she left her knife with her boots and the rest of her supplies back at the tree that looked just like any other tree and she paid no heed to her direction when she fled so she would not find it again even _if_ she could walk —

She knew now why the colors muted too, the instinct of a firebender cutting through the haze of her oxygen-deprived brain. The sun was setting. She had slept all day, and her body still felt like it had taken hours of punishment. She would have to spend another night here…

_You may not last that long_, Azula admitted, when another cramp cut through her sharper than the last, and so sudden it wrenched a breathless cry from her lips.

She wondered if she was losing the baby.

_This was what you wanted_, she reminded herself pointlessly, though she knew very well what her mother would say. That she deserved this, for wishing her baby dead. Her tears fell on the water when Azula bent forward to hug herself, head bowed as if she could hold the pain inside any more than —

"Don't _cry_, 'Zula," spoke a child's worried voice.

And she lifted her head, dizzy with the effort and eyes blurred with tears, to see her brother stood before her in the falling dark, bent over her hiding place with hands on his knees. He could not be older than four or maybe five. He still wore his hair in a ponytail and hadn't even lost his baby fat yet, his round face scrunched in the look of unstudied concern their mother loved so well, and which Azula could never recall him directing at her.

It just made her want to smack him. Didn't he know the world would beat him down over and over again so long as he kept that way? That not just Father and Azula, but every person with an ounce of cunning would take advantage of him when he wore his heart on his sleeve like that? She told him so many times, but he never listened until it was too late.

Yet in the end, _he_ prevailed. The world bent to him. He got to be himself without condition, but not her. Never her. She didn't understand…

"You said it was my turn to be 'it'," Zuko reminded patiently, as oblivious to her conflict as to the weak sobs she gasped, huddled in her hole in the roots. "But you hid so well, I couldn't find you."

The hallucination stood and reached out smiling to add, "'Til now. I'll always find you."

She sucked in a shuddering breath and let it out, but made no move to take his hand. He wasn't even here. He never had been. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, and her throat felt raw for want of water when Azula whispered faintly, "Not this time." And his face fell.

"It's getting dark," the hallucination warned, looking anxiously about them when she leaned into one of the tree roots. "But I can find our way." It lit a flame in its outstretched hand, such a tiny, fragile thing that it flickered even in the absence of wind. Azula's stomach still clenched painfully at the sight, plucked out from her earliest memories and brought freshly to life. How desperately she wanted to bend when Zuko made his first flame, and she saw how their parents exclaimed over him…

As if seeing the look on her face, it sought to reassure her, "Don't worry, you'll learn how to bend when you get older!" But she hadn't waited that long, she started when she was three. "Pretty soon, you'll know how to do everything I do," the hallucination spoke confidently. "You're smart for a girl, you'll pick it up in no time."

Her raw eyes burned with tears. Half of what it just said might be condescending bullshit, but this was still more supportive than Azula could ever remember him being. She recalled the jealous looks he gave her when she surpassed him in bending, and even before that, when she started earlier and Father recognized her talent. His resentment when she survived her fall at the Western Air Temple. How Zuko sized her up before their Agni Kai. The padded cell he locked her in, only to shun her for four years.

The night he raped her.

And she couldn't reconcile it. How the little boy who stood before her could do —

"Why did —" she tried, and choked on her words. She dragged air into her burning lungs in deep, ragged gasps, and could still feel herself beginning to black out. The twilight beneath the trees grew dimmer until the flame was all she could see clearly.

"Where were — you when I — _wanted_ you?" Azula wept, clutching the arm he burned to her chest, her skin searing so hot that her tears turned to steam. "Where were you when I wanted you?"

She could not make out his face anymore, but saw the shift in his stance before he let die the flame in his palm. She felt more than saw his sadness. "Dad killed me," the hallucination said forlornly. "And you laughed."

Her chest clutched painfully when she remembered that night, the night her mother left. And Azula thought it was cruelly appropriate that it was not Ursa here with her, at the end. She whispered, "I didn't mean it." Her eyes drifted closed.

The water made no sound when Zuko moved closer, but Azula felt his presence as clearly as if he sat on the edge of her bed, when she pulled the covers over her head.

"I know," she dimly heard him speak.

And the last thing she felt was him hugging her shoulders, his head laid against hers. Then she felt nothing at all.


	16. Ties

**Laptop is restored to me surprisingly intact, so this month's update is only a little late. And with several intriguing reviews in the meantime, I have been much encouraged to keep writing despite time constraints and tech issues. So thank you for your feedback! Question and answer time...**

**Regarding whether or not Zuko and Azula's chapter 7 encounter constituted rape: We have only seen and considered what happened subjectively so far, through the lens of other characters who all have their own interpretations on the event, and this was deliberate on my part. I want to leave it open to interpretation.**

**However, since two separate reviewers brought it up last chapter, I thought I might at least offer my own opinion, in short, if you want to know what informs my writing. (Your own reading, of course, will be informed by your own opinion, based on the story as told and how YOU interpret it.)**

**[author tract]**

**I would argue that consent was questionable all around in their encounter, but that Azula's consent was more questionable than Zuko's. True, she did "start it," and was forceful in her seduction. But Zuko is physically stronger than her, as we saw when he overpowered Azula subsequent to her trying to kill him, and her sprained ankle was enough of a demobilizing injury that he could have gotten away if he wanted to. I really didn't see her as being in a state of mind to start throwing lightning at him if he broke it off and tried to run.**

**At the same time, Azula's consent was questionable due not only to her history of insanity (and Zuko knowing about it), but by the fact that she was in the midst of a severe psychotic break throughout their entire sexual encounter. This break started when Zuko hit her, was in full-tilt after he burned her, and eventually culminated in the complete dissociative episode we saw, where she did and said to Zuko what Ozai had done and said to her — effectively taking on Ozai's identity as a defense mechanism, when Zuko overpowered her and stripped away the last vestiges of her control.**

**Of course, what makes this ambiguous (and even more tragic) is that Zuko didn't recognize her psychotic break for what it was at the time, not yet knowing her underlying issues. The adrenaline rush and danger of their fight already had him primed, and he became increasingly enraged by Azula's bizarre and inappropriate reactions to him.**

**The problem was, of course, it never once occurred to Zuko that (at least after he burned her) Azula was not reacting to him at all. She was reacting the way she had been conditioned to by years of abuse from their abusive father. Unfortunately, the same response that would satisfy Ozai only pushed Zuko further over the edge, and ... Well, we saw what happened.**

**[/author tract]**

**Re: Zuko's harem suggestion... What, you forgot June? For shame, man. For shame. No orgy is complete without our favorite Avatar sexpot!**

**But seriously, I probably wouldn't write that. I'm not too familiar with the genre, but from what examples I've seen, a "harem" story just doesn't strike me as plot-heavy enough to suit my style. Not to mention, Zuko's personality doesn't lend itself to promiscuity on that level. But I'm sure you'll find plenty of other authors willing to take that on, so it shouldn't be a problem.**

**I hope you all enjoy the chapter. If you've liked June's part in the story, please know you have my sort-of beta Meneldur to thank, as much as myself. It might never have happened without him bringing our favorite bounty hunter to my attention this past summer. He's also contributed some great ideas to her involvement in the plot — such as the specifics of Zuko's captivity this chapter, and subsequent rumors — in addition to his usual valuable input. (Thanks, Meneldur!)**

**With that acknowledgment done, I'll let you get to reading. (And hopefully reviewing :)**

* * *

Their seat was bigger than his father's throne, was Iroh's first thought on being brought before the Beifongs. Even if it was made less impressive by the lack of flames, the effect was not much diminished. This family regarded itself as royalty, he realized, and Iroh would be prudent to treat them as such. When they had information he needed…

"I must admit surprise," Lao Beifong spoke coolly at last, after studying Iroh a long moment with hands clasped before him. "I did not foresee the Avatar himself would recruit my daughter as his earthbending teacher, it is true." His whole aspect hardened, the points of his mustache twitching when he scowled. "But never in a hundred years did I guess I might host the _Butcher_ of Ba Sing Se."

Iroh sighed, for while the epithet had lost much of its sting in the intervening years, he knew his past might be an obstacle to securing Azula's safety now. But just so, it might help his case to be upfront about his motives and connection to her. This opportunity — and the tip his fellow Lotus initiate passed on to him, the subsequent meeting arranged — would be what he made of it.

"I see my reputation precedes me." Iroh spoke neutrally, careful not to fall back on the genial attitude he adopted now as a matter of course. He folded callused hands in his lap where he sat before Lao and Poppy Beifong on a too-small bench in a richly appointed parlor, knowing inappropriate cheer might cause them offense under the circumstances.

It seemed his effort was wasted, when Beifong sat up straighter with fists clenched on his knees to warn, "You may have fled to obscurity since, but no man, woman, or child on this continent will **forget** what you did to our people. My own cousins were murdered, their lands and estate _burned_ in your army's ruthless advance to Ba Sing Se," he accused, gray eyes glaring darkly. "Now you ask that I aid this war criminal niece of yours, another blood-soaked conqueror like yourself?"

"Begging your pardon," Iroh spoke mildly, not bothering to dispute the charges against Azula or himself, knowing it would be fruitless, "but I was under the impression you already had."

His nostrils flared. "My wife has a soft heart," Lao spoke tersely, in a tone that seemed to imply, _And a soft head_. Poppy watched him silently from the corners of her narrowed eyes, and Iroh got the impression Beifong had had to repeat this same argument many times in the weeks since Azula left Gaoling. "It is not her fault or mine the princess deceived her."

"She didn't lie about everything," Poppy surprised her husband and Iroh equally by speaking up softly, having shown all the presence of a piece of furniture up to this point. "I really believe she is searching for her mother," she addressed this comment to Iroh, but reproached her husband, "and she could not fake her condition. I know —"

"Poppy, please," Lao Beifong cut her off, laying a hand in warning on the shared arm of their elaborate chair. He couldn't even reach her from where he sat. "We've discussed this. We want no part in the dynastic disputes of the Fire Nation," he said firmly to Iroh, who couldn't be more lost by this point.

"What disputes?" he asked quickly, leaning forward with hands on his knees. Had Azula made some claim to the Burning Throne? But that would hardly support the idea they didn't recognize her.

And what condition did this woman refer to? Was Azula acting outwardly unstable? Madness didn't elicit sympathy in most people, but then, Poppy Beifong had surprised him more than once today.

"You men with your talk of blood feuds and thrones," she spoke with disdain, white hands folded in her lap, "and no care for lives destroyed here and now. They will still kill her if they catch her, nevermind if —"

"It's none of our concern," Lao bit out, visibly annoyed. Thoroughly ignored by both parties, Iroh could only watch the absurd tableau of them arguing over the arm of the chair. "Why should you concern yourself with her? You shared table with this girl _once_, and she **lied** to you! What basis is that to defend her?"

"She knows Toph —"

"She **fought** Toph!" Lao Beifong objected, flinging out his hands in mute argument. "She is not just Fire Nation, she was the Fire Lord's _daughter_ —"

"She has a _mother_ too!" Poppy surged to her slippered feet atop the broad cushion of her chair to shout down at Lao, who recoiled in surprise. "Somewhere out there is a mother who wants her _daughter_ back just as desperately as I do!" She forked a hand into her own breast to make the point. "Somewhere out there is a mother who only wants to be **reconciled** with her daughter, and she may never get the chance! I would not see that happen to another family," she angrily maintained, "I _won't!_"

Toph's mother smoothed her skirts aggressively, before sitting _seiza_ on her cushion again. She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath to say, "Her words gave me the courage to write to Toph, and say things I've needed to say for a long time."

She raised her head, and looked directly at Iroh. Her husband managed only to stare at her. "Your niece came with me to a scrivener's shop, where she requested a map. I don't recall what it showed, but the shopkeeper could tell you. He keeps records of all his transactions. I gave her an ostrich horse from our stables, a fine beast with black plumage, and a first class passport for ease of travel. Though —" she paused doubtfully, "— if her circumstances are desperate as I have heard, she may be reluctant to use it."

Iroh blinked once, and considered that was a lot easier than he had any right to expect.

"_Poppy_…" Lao Beifong said weakly, but she only smiled and shifted closer to the shared arm of their greatchair, reaching across it to take his hand.

"There will be so many chasing her." Her green eyes sparkled with the light of a shared secret. "No one need ever know he came from us." And Iroh thought her husband should be struck dumb on receiving such a look from such a beautiful woman, if he were any kind of man.

"That — that wasn't what —" Lao Beifong cleared his throat conspicuously, before fixing Iroh with a harsh gaze. "For the sake of your silence, I will not turn you over to the war crimes tribunal," he warned, still holding his wife's hand in a gesture that seemed now more protective than repressive. "But know that you are never again welcome in Gaoling. Conclude your business with all haste and discretion, and be gone."

Iroh nodded mutely, accepting his dismissal, and stood stiffly to be ushered from the room by one of their multitude of green-smocked servants. Beifong did not even wait for him to leave, before turning back to his wife to ask, "You wrote to Toph? Have you heard —"

But the paneled door slid shut behind Iroh at that, and he heard no more about it.

* * *

Zuko sighed when the paneled door to their rented room slid shut in his face, and opened it again to follow June inside, without comment. She'd become friendlier — relatively speaking — since they recovered her father, and Zuko had stopped taking offense at minor insults like these. It reminded him a little of how Azula used to tease him, though he'd never not taken offense at that.

He dumped their bags on the bed nearest the door and looked around the room, frowning at the meanness of their accommodations. Two double beds with rusted iron frame head- and footboards and moth-eaten blankets were pushed against the bare wall to his left. An unlevel nightstand sat between them, with a paper lamp perched precariously on the lower end. Besides the patched sofa against the opposite wall, and the beaten old dresser and threadbare tatami mat on the floor, these were the only furnishings. Though the room did sport two windows, as it was situated at a corner of the third story of the seedy little inn June chose.

"I don't see why we couldn't just camp again," Zuko pointed out, while she walked to the window that looked out on the town square, hands clasped in front of her. June glanced back at him in the light of afternoon, a smirk curving her painted lips.

"Maybe 'cause we sail at daybreak?" She raised an eyebrow. "And you'd rather not sleep on a dead guy's bedroll?"

He had every other night they made camp so far, though it hadn't been a dead guy's bedroll until the Dai Li … well. "Where am I supposed to sleep now?" Zuko demanded lightly, throwing open the adjoining window that looked over the black tile roofs of this small coastal city. "There are only two beds."

"Take the couch," she grunted, leaning back against the window frame with elbows propped behind her. She winked at his scowl, shadowed eyes glinting wickedly. "I've stayed here before, kid. Trust me, you'd _rather_ take the couch."

Zuko cast a suspicious glance at the beds, and took a seat gingerly in the center the sofa. "What's keeping your father?" he asked her instead. "You said he already bought our tickets." Leaving such matters to household servants as he usually did, Zuko hadn't embarked on this mission with any money on him. An oversight June made him regret more than once.

"He has to arrange shipping for Nyla, find somewhere to keep him for the night," June spoke casually, dropping down beside him to drape herself over the corner of the couch, arms spread comfortably at her sides and legs crossed at the knee. "Besides, it gives us a chance to talk…"

The pointed toe of her boot ran up his pants leg, and Zuko shot restlessly to his feet, moving to the same window where June had stood. He wondered if he imagined the flicker of annoyance that he glimpsed in her on turning back. "About your sister?" June elaborated, not stirring from where she sat. Zuko let out a long, low breath. "And how we're going to handle her.

"Don't get me wrong, my dad's capable. But I'd rather leave him out of this. He's getting older, and from everything I've heard," she paused, grimacing, "your princess can be a dangerous person to cross."

"I understand," Zuko reassured her. Though he supposed he didn't really, unless — as had been his habit for the last four years — he thought of Iroh in place of his father. He hesitated, crossed his arms where he stood with his back to the window, but couldn't help observing, "You two seem close."

June shrugged. "He's my dad."

And Zuko pursed his lips, struck again by a niggling doubt that only grew the more he saw them together. "I guess you must take after your mom," he added after a moment's silence, deciding it couldn't hurt to ask June. But the bounty hunter just blinked once, a frown line forming between her brows. "I mean," Zuko fumbled, suddenly uncomfortable, "you don't look much like him."

"I don't look _anything_ like him," June corrected lightly, uncrossing her legs to sit up. "Not that surprising, since I'm adopted."

"You're _adopted?_" Zuko repeated slowly, and let down his arms in shock. "But who would —"

"— give a kid to a bounty hunter?" June finished his thought with the hint of a smile, when Zuko stopped. "No one who had any choice about it."

She climbed to her feet to join him at the open window, leaning on the sill to look out over the coastal town when she explained, "My parents were Fire Nation colonists, some kind of bureaucrats." And Zuko nodded unseen behind her. He had thought she looked Fire Nation when they first met.

"I was too young to remember just what they did for a living. Guess it wasn't doing it for 'em, 'cause they decided to make a little on the side. Embezzling, or some such shit," June spoke with contempt. "You know what they say," she glanced over her shoulder to take in his surprise. "Small minds, small crimes."

She shrugged, and stood to rest her hand on the windowsill. "Their employers put a bounty on them, and my dad came to collect. I was their only child. They said there was no one to take me in. I guess it could have been a lie," June speculated, remarkably undisturbed by the possibility, or indeed, what had actually happened to her family. "People'll say just about anything to stay out of prison.

"But my dad turned them in, and raised me himself. He said he always wanted a kid anyway," she added, as if this explained anything about a history Zuko never would have suspected for her.

"They got out when I was thirteen," June continued, seeming to speak more to herself than to Zuko, as she watched townspeople mill about the square below. "My dad told me about them, who they were and where I could find them. I looked them up, of course. I was curious, who wouldn't be?

"But I watched them awhile, before I tried to talk to them. Then I decided not to try. They weren't my kind of people," she said flatly, with no hint of regret. "Small minds, small crimes. I was thirteen years old, and already amounted to more than they ever would. I left them and didn't look back."

Zuko blinked against the strange spell cast by her confession, and an unidentifiable ache in the pit of his stomach. "Why are you telling me this?" he said at last.

"Gee, I don't know," June volunteered, thoughtful enough that he wasn't entirely sure if she was being sarcastic. "'Cause you _asked?_" Still watching the windows of apartments and shops across the square from them, she didn't look up when he flinched, reminded of Azula's scathing retort. "But that's not right, is it?" She glanced up at him. "You're too polite or incurious for that."

June smiled coldly, and walked back into the room to argue instead, "Or maybe because — like every other privileged tool I ever met — you got your head stuck so far up your ass, you're never going to get it until someone spells it out for you." And Zuko scowled, vaguely insulted but reluctant to take the bait, when he didn't know what he was supposed to glean from this. June sighed and turned to face him, holding onto her arm in a strangely vulnerable pose.

"I realized my father was my family," she said intently. "Him and our friends and the people we worked with, they were my family. Not the people I share blood in common with, and nothing else." She stepped close, so unusually serious that for once, Zuko ignored the instinct to move away.

"**You** choose who your family is, you choose who they're _not_," June explained. "You have that right. So does she."

"Azula," Zuko said tightly, realizing too late that June must have picked up on his argument with Ty Lee…

_Please Zuko, just leave her alone. She doesn't want to see you._

June shrugged one shoulder with the hint of a smile, glancing at something out the window behind him. "Just some food for thought." She tilted her head, and her brown eyes gleamed darkly at him. "Consider it a parting gift."

"What —" was all Zuko had time to say, before a sharp burst of pain erupted at the base of his neck.

He turned swiftly to find the threat, twisting to try to grab the dart lodged between his shoulder blades. But he didn't have time even to spot who had shot him, before his limbs grew heavy with pins and needles, and he collapsed back into June's waiting arms. _Shirsu venom_. And it occurred to him just what was keeping June's father.

"Whoa, careful now," she chided, lowering him onto his side on the tatami mat to tug the dart from him. Zuko couldn't help a low hiss of pain, his teeth clenched. "I don't want to hurt you. That's a complication I don't need."

"What are you _doing?_" he demanded, glaring impotently up at her when June rolled him onto his back. "We had a **deal**, you _owe_ me!"

"S'far as I'm concerned, we're even," June flatly contradicted, her fingers working deftly at the cloth belt that cinched his vest, to strip it when she loosed the knot. "My dad never woulda been kidnapped in the _first_ place, if you didn't spring Sissy for a little conjugal visit —"

"_What?_" Zuko choked into the carpet, too disgusted by her account of it to even ask why June pinned him on his side and tugged his vest off, only to toss it away when she eased Zuko on his back.

"Yeah, spare me the details." She held up a gloved hand to cut off his protest. "I know enough to know you were involved in her escape. That set the Dai Li on her trail, and now here we are.

"On the other hand," she mused, tugging the front of his shirt open with a gusto that went beyond disturbing, "you _did_ help rescue him. So I won't feel the need to come after you personally." June paused in her work, bent over him, to look down at Zuko from behind the hanging curtain of her hair. "I'll even agree not to hunt your sister for the Earth Kingdom or any other clients."

And Zuko knew that promise applied to him too. "June, please," he swallowed his pride. "You **know** what's at stake for her. I'll pay you anything you want."

"I'm sure you _would_, such a loving brother you are," June lightly replied, and he colored at her sarcasm. "But all the money in your royal treasury won't do me a lick of good when I'm **dead**." Zuko blinked, and June raised an eyebrow at him, flipping him onto his stomach to pull his shirt off and leave him bare to the waist. "Or maybe you think that general who ratted her out just cut his own balls, nose, and limbs off and killed _himself?_" Zuko heard her chuckle darkly, when the door slid open behind them to admit he was guessing her father, though he couldn't see any of this, with his face to the floor.

"I kinda doubt you ordered his execution," June concluded and rolled Zuko onto his back, her hands braced against his shoulders. "Which tells me your sister has some nasty supporters. How much do you think they'll _like_ me, if I help big, bad Fire Lord put her under lock and key again?"

And June's father whistled in appreciation, on seeing the effects of the shirsu spit dart. "I'd forgotten how potent those can be," he observed, with an air of absentminded surprise more characteristic of a scholar than a bounty hunter. "Good idea, sweetheart."

"Good shot, Dad," June sat back to greet him, grinning unabashedly. It made her look ten years younger. "Guess some things never change."

He shrugged modestly, spreading his hands to reveal the spring-loaded dart gun clipped to his belt. "It helps I got to practice on our dinner yesterday."

"The hog monkey?" Zuko demanded, distracted when he remembered last night's stringy fare, and how little June and her father partook of it. "My whole _tongue_ went numb eating that!"

June snorted in an effort to contain her laughter, but one glance exchanged with her father saw them both snickering, probably remembering how incomprehensible his speech was afterward, how unconvincingly they feigned ignorance. And Zuko supposed there _were_ worse pranks than being made to fall into a fountain with your sister's best friend.

Her father wiped tears of mirth from his eyes, while June looked down on the half-naked Zuko almost fondly. "If you didn't whine so much, I'd actually say I'm gonna miss you. Dad, can you help with his boots?" she spoke abruptly, and Zuko flushed crimson, realizing all too clearly how this was going to end.

"You won't get much for my clothes," he spoke hurriedly, while June's father tugged the boot from first one foot, then another, and she loosed the fly of his pants with no evident embarrassment. "You'll find such like that anywhere in the Fire Nation."

"Oh, we aren't gonna _sell_ them," June reassured him, her hands pausing at his waistband. "Too much chance they might be recognized. This is just to prevent pursuit."

"What _pursuit?_" Zuko demanded, his voice falling to an angry hiss. "I'm paralyzed, and —" June flipped him onto his stomach again, and without the least warning, pulled his pants down over his rear end. "June, **STOP!**" he yelped, his face burning with embarrassment. "Think about this! You're going to **undress** me in front of your _father?_"

"I blame _myself_, for raising her around a bunch of roughnecks," June's dad said regretfully, though the effect was rather ruined when he smiled fondly at his adopted daughter yanking the pants off a prostrate and now completely naked Fire Lord. "Then I see how **you** turned out," he added casually, with the same wicked gleam in his eyes Zuko had seen in June too many times to count. "And I don't feel so bad."

"I can take it from here, Dad," June pointed out, resting a hand on the small of Zuko's back. "Meet me at the spot?"

"Of course," he easily replied, snapping off a flame salute to Zuko with a mocking little smile on his weathered face, before he walked out the paneled door and slid it shut behind him.

Zuko was breathing hard by this time, his helpless rage threatening to overwhelm his common sense. He may be paralyzed, he considered, when June climbed to her feet and walked out of his line of sight, but he could probably still breathe fire. _And what good would that do?_ he chided himself. _If you give her a scar to match, you're still at her mercy. Or her _dad's_, when he comes looking for her_.

He heard June rustle the covers on the bed nearest the window, before she walked back to grab him under the armpits, and heft him up onto the mussed sheets. "What are you doing?" he grit out again, when June propped him back against the iron headboard, and produced two pairs of handcuffs from a hidden pocket in her skirt, grabbing his wrist to cuff him to the headboard behind.

And she smirked, not even sparing him a glance when she leaned across him to cuff his other wrist. "_Really?_" she spoke in disbelief. "You're kinky enough to keep it in the family, and you don't know what this is?"

Zuko scowled at her when she withdrew to sit propped on one arm beside him. "I told you. We have to make sure we're not followed. I could gag you," she admitted easily, "but you'd probably just burn the gag. You may be paralyzed, but you can still call for help." And Zuko felt a swift twinge of guilt, reminded of the Dai Li she tortured.

"This gives you a reason not to," June explained, tilting her head. "No news travels faster than scandal. And I doubt your wife'd be too understanding, after all the family bonding you've been doing lately."

"And what's to stop me _chasing_ you when I get free?" Zuko snapped, glaring at her. Where did she get off talking about what happened with Azula, like she knew anything about it? "Or do you think I'll stay cuffed to this headboard forever?"

June smirked. "'Course not," she replied, producing the key to his handcuffs. "You can even free _yourself_, if you're willing to wait, oh, an hour or two." She laid the key between his legs, and fetched a round decorative pillow from the couch to cover it and … other parts, crossing his legs at the ankle to hold the pillow in place, before she stepped back to admire her work.

"I speak from experience, though I won't tell you how," she said casually, striding about the room to snatch up his clothes and boots and stuff them in the emptier of their two bags.

"You'll need _something_ to occupy your time 'til then," June added and dropped down to sit beside him again, her shadowed eyes raking the length of his body. "Too bad that can't be me." She favored him with a predator's grin, and remarked, "You filled out nicely since we first met."

"Will you _stop_ looking at me like a piece of **meat?!**" Zuko burst out angrily, pushed past the limits of his patience by her attitude, on top what she already did.

"Oh please," June scoffed with fond contempt, leaning close to press a chaste kiss to his burning cheek, "like you wouldn't **love** it." She stood and threw the bags from the adjacent bed over her shoulder, her painted lips bent in a superior smile. "Unfortunately, time's come to get as far away from you as possible. But you're used to that by now, aren't you?" She quirked a brow, while Zuko could only seethe in silence, cuffed in place and paralyzed as he was.

"And if it happens you don't feel the same, I guess I should remind you," June added in parting, as if humoring him. "That besides the hot, animal sex we just had here today, I know about your little fuck buddy the princess too. So will everyone we cross paths with, on the way to whatever messy end you have planned for me."

She smiled cruelly at his outrage, drove the dagger home. "Also doubt your friend the Avatar would be too keen to hear, how you helped me torture that defenseless Dai Li. And you depend on his friendship, don't you?" she spoke rhetorically, walking out the door. "Just some friendly advice."

June paused on the threshold with their bags in hand, and said in parting, "It's been fun, kid." She reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear, and smirk over her shoulder at Zuko. "Have a nice life."

She slid the door shut behind her, and Zuko exhaled flames with his next breath. Fire licked at his throat when he snarled his frustration. But in the end, defeated by her arguments as surely as her treachery, Zuko could only drop his head back against the wrought iron behind him.

* * *

Azula blinked blearily up at the fine white mosquito netting that draped the strange bed she woke in, and stirred with the breeze of someone's passage. Her hair was unbound from its clumsy braid, and her head lay on a sweat-soaked pillow, the rest of her bundled in clean white sheets and what felt like a simple cotton shift.

"Well, are'n you lookin' _lively_ this mornin'?" the someone drawled cheerfully, and Azula couldn't help flinching at the knives that pierced her head with the intrusion of that voice.

"Sorry," the voice added more softly, when the middle-aged woman observed her reaction, upon pinning back the net that draped Azula's bed. "Guess it's true what they say though," she smiled kindly down at Azula, and laugh lines creased the corners of her mouth. "Firebenders _do_ rise with the sun."

Azula breathed deeply and squinted in the green-tinged light falling through the open archway — gods, she could go the rest of her life without seeing that color again, and never feel deprived — making a concerted effort to assess her surroundings despite a throbbing headache and other pains that were just becoming apparent.

She was in a small bamboo hut with a thatch roof, and one empty door and one open window cut opposite each other. From where she lay, she could just make out the edges of a small porch, some boggy ground, and an adjacent hut through the archway; the window only opened on encroaching vegetation.

It seemed this hut served simultaneously as home and clinic to the woman who stood studying her, with a hammock hanging near the window that had seen more use than the bed Azula lay in, and a rough hewn bureau opposite the bed that boasted an array of jars and boxes of many different colors and sizes, some spilling medical supplies as obvious as gauze and thread for stitches, others containing an assortment of different flowers and herbs. That Azula found herself in a clinic and not a prison cell — or what would pass for it, in such rustic surrounds — probably meant well for her situation. That she was unbound could only indicate they didn't know who she was, but…

No, she was forgetting something. Azula struggled to make her mind work faster. _Firebenders rise with the sun_. If they knew she was a firebender, how —

"Ma name's Anyu, but most ever'one calls me Annie. And yer baby's fine, by the way," the woman added at last, clearly hoping to draw her out. Her eyebrows drew low with concern over round blue eyes almost as dark as her tanned skin, while she waited for Azula to speak. Her breasts were bound by a length of green cloth wrapped several times around her torso and secured with a knot, and she wore a skirt that seemed to be made of long grasses.

Azula blinked slowly, painfully against the light, her eyes beginning to smart. "My — _what?_" she forced out through parched lips, her voice rusty and hoarse from lack of use.

Her graying caretaker frowned quizzically. "Ya knew you had a egg in the nest, did'n ya?" Azula sighed and turned her face into the pillow, pressing the heel of her hand hard against her forehead to try to stop her head spinning. It didn't help much. "A baby in yer belly," the woman added, perhaps interpreting Azula's lack of reply for confusion.

"I guessed as much," the princess snapped half-heartedly, letting her hand drop on the pillow. Her joints were a fire of broken glass, and every inch of her ached. She could hardly feel her breasts hurting anymore, even though they did. Were they bigger than she remembered? Azula wondered, looking down. Damn it.

Azula tried to prop herself up into a sitting position, and quickly gave it up for a bad job. She reached down instead, running a hand over her stomach. And stopped. There was — What was that? Not quite a bump, but a _softness_, a roundness so small she was sure she imagined it. _It wouldn't be the first thing you imagined in this gods-forsaken place_.

How long had she been here? Azula wondered in something approaching panic. She couldn't be _showing_ already! Well, she wasn't exactly, but — How long had she been here?

"It were a close thing though," Annie sat comfortably at the foot of her bed to blather on, oblivious to Azula's upset. "If'n we found ya a day or even a few hours later, ya probably woulda died. And that woulda been it for little Firebug."

"Don't _call_ it that!" Azula snapped, moving a hand over her stomach as if to hide something already invisible from view. _Stupid_. "It's not even a person," she whispered harshly, looking away.

Even if it lived when it should have died, that didn't mean anything. Azula didn't know what to feel at the news. Relief? Disappointment? So she didn't feel anything at all.

"Maybe not," the braided Anyu acknowledged, with a knowing glance that got under Azula's skin like a bad itch. "But it _will_ be."

"How long have I been here?" Azula demanded, before she could offer more unsolicited folk wisdom.

If the woman was angered by her ingratitude, she didn't show it. "A week, almost two now."

Azula stared coldly at her, barely managing to hide her surprise. "You're a waterbender," she spoke slowly with a voice like poisoned honey, amber eyes locked on the dark blue of her caretaker's. "But I don't recall that water-healing took that long."

And Anyu did frown this time. "Weren't no water-healin' what saved ya, even though we gave it a shot. You was in a bad way, runnin' such a fever and even had a fit or two, that we did'n have time. But ya picked a good time to fall sick, fer all that," the woman added, propping herself comfortably on one arm. "We jest got a shipment of medicines and foodstuffs from the Fire Nation. And that quinine did fer ya what my water could'n, lucky enough."

The question must have been written appallingly clear on her face, for Annie explained without prompting, "See, that Fire Lord, he traveled all over the world chasin' the Avatar before he turn good. Now he sends help to lotsa under'veloped regions, like Foggy Swamp and the Si Wong."

The whole time she spoke, Azula could only stare at her and try to ignore something like a burning behind her eyes. "Fire — Lord _Zuko?_" she whispered haltingly, at last. Anyu nodded, and a dark chuckle bubbled up from somewhere inside Azula, and she laughed until she cried.

And when the woman recovered wits enough to ask, she could not say for the life of her why.

* * *

Iroh swirled the dregs of his tea idly about the bottom of his cup, a sight more mournful even than the sun setting on another day of fruitless searching. Even if sunsets at the edge of the desert where he had made camp were unusually vibrant in color, and Iroh was the closest to comfortable that he could achieve in traveling alone at an advanced age — sitting tailor style on his camp bed with a newly empty teapot hung above the makeshift fire pit in front of him, a cup of the same in his hand and the eel hound curled up napping nearby — these aesthetic and material comforts did little to lift his spirits like they normally would.

He should have found his niece by now. If it were anyone else, he would have. But Azula confounded his plans as she would do, and had been doing since she was old enough to talk. Not only in herself, but in the strong reactions she elicited from just about everyone. Foremost among these, Iroh had to acknowledge, was unreasoned hatred. At least here in the Earth Kingdom, where she had most unhelpfully decided to flee.

Iroh could guess why all the information that reached him of her whereabouts — and this was little enough — was so woefully outdated. It was not only because he was too busy (and temporarily imprisoned) in chasing the false trail she laid outside Senlin Village that he had missed the boat on Kyoshi Island, so to speak. Neither could he lay the sole blame for his late arrival in Gaoling on that clever ruse, or the competing pursuit he was obliged to either avoid or fight off in chasing this and other leads. No, the urge to blame Azula's own manipulations for his continued failure was tempting, but not wholly accurate.

Iroh was forced to acknowledge the limitations of his Order. He felt no guilt in admitting this was not the first time he had used his connections to the secret society to further personal concerns. Indeed, that may well have been the only way he and Zuko remained alive and free as fugitives from two nations. But using the Order to help himself or even his angry, banished nephew was a different prospect than using it to help Azula.

Members of the Order were supposed to forsake ties of family and nation in joining, or at least not let these blind them to the pursuit of truth and beauty that was the stated goal of their society. But Iroh need only look at himself to know that that didn't always happen. Zuko may have been suspect for his heritage, but it was one that had visibly rejected him; Iroh had heinous deeds to his name, but he had put aside that life and suffered public disgrace for it. And so he and his nephew had received the sometimes grudging help of even Earth Kingdom initiates to the Order.

But Azula was neither of those cases. A true daughter of flame and living symbol of Fire Nation dominance, she had been promoted as such by rebels and malcontents since her brother's ascension to the throne. Tiring of some of the more outrageous rumors concerned her fate subsequent, Zuko had publicly admitted that Azula was institutionalized for her care and protection. But if the cook Rai was any indication, even this was not widely believed, and had not done much to tarnish her image at home. Or redeem her in the eyes of a hostile Earth Kingdom.

He also sincerely doubted Azula would ever renounce her deeds in service to her father. Not that this would loosen the tongues of members of his Order, whom Iroh knew were excluding him from what they learned. But it would have been a nice start, he acknowledged, and set the cup down on the camp bed beside him with a heavy sigh, to tuck hands in his sleeves.

Those first weeks after Azula's escape had been a rude awakening, as Iroh compared what little information he gained of her whereabouts with who he should have heard it from, and realized this silence was deliberate. He dared not tell Zuko of his suspicions. His nephew was obsessed enough already and seemed on the edge of despair; Iroh did not like to think what the perception of another enemy might push him to.

But there were still those within the Order (and outside of it) in his debt, ties Iroh had cultivated over the course of years, and he reached out to them now — _What did Azula call it?_ Iroh thought, caught by a sudden recollection. A … _network of allies and economy of favors_, Iroh heard the words in his head as if in her own voice. How old had she been when he overheard her say that? _Not old enough_, he remembered a little sadly. _Not nearly old enough_.

Iroh's own network reached out to the few who could help and be trusted in such a matter, and their careful efforts had finally led him here, to what seemed to be his first real lead…

The scrivener's shop in Gaoling had proved a surprise, as Iroh entered expecting its proprietor to be suspicious and resentful of the attention that had fallen on him for his fleeting service to the fugitive princess. Instead, the man explained that he was enjoying a small boost in business, reproducing the map Azula had requested for bounty hunters, mercenaries, and even a few government and military officials.

Iroh hoped for her sake she was not actually headed that way, though after the first false trail Azula laid, he doubted it. Still, he could afford to leave no stone unturned, as the earthbenders said. So Iroh had dispatched his own copy of the map to Sokka, along with a request to search the region by air. He hoped their unusual mode of transportation would help the Tribesman and his team avoid other parties pursuing Azula, or at least outrun them.

As this group seemed less likely to successfully subdue her, Iroh thought it more prudent to spend their efforts on the less promising lead. Though he was sure to pass along to Toph — who would have to hear it from Sokka — that her parents had written to her. Unfortunately, that reunion would have to wait a little longer. For while it was unlikely Azula would take the route she indicated in requesting the map, it was still possible. Even if she did not, the location might hold some clue to her intentions or be intended to convey a message of some sort. He had known her to be extremely subtle, and it was too early to discount any possibilities.

This was part of the reason he went further, and asked the shopkeeper to retrace Azula's steps in her visit there. He stood where his niece has stood, and paid careful attention to the maps she would have seen, but not requested. He purchased all of these, returning an empty smile to the shopkeeper's questioning look. The maps offered several possibilities for her ultimate destination, but only one that tailored with further inquiries he made after her conspicuous ostrich horse, the trail he had subsequently followed across the mountains into the Si Wong Desert, before it ran cold…

It seemed she was headed back to Omashu, and Iroh had asked the young Avatar and his waterbending wife to meet him on the way there. As of last contact, he knew they were searching the southern coast of the Earth Kingdom, and Iroh expected them any day now. In the meantime, he was left with only his own thoughts, and the lingering question of why Azula would return to the city where she was briefly held prisoner.

Iroh had visited Omashu discreetly in her wake after Senlin Village, and had an account of events from Bumi himself. He knew the mad king had shortly released her, and Iroh was reluctantly convinced of his logic. Iroh also knew he shared this same logic with Azula, and warned her against returning. So why would she go back? What was her purpose?

Could she really be searching for her mother? Iroh wondered, and watched embers curl and die in the cooling fire pit. This story would appeal to a mother unhappily estranged from her daughter, as Poppy Beifong was. And Iroh had known his niece to be so manipulative in the past.

Yet he also recalled the accounts of her doctors, that Ursa was the most persistent of her hallucinations. Perhaps she hoped to find the closure she needed to heal her mind, in finding her mother? Iroh could not imagine what else would spur Azula to seek her out, when from what he had seen, their relationship was antagonistic at best.

But even if his supposition was correct, it did little to explain her direction. What did she know, or think she knew, about Ursa's whereabouts?

The low groan of a flying bison sounded through the twilight behind him, and Iroh lurched to his feet from the camp bed, turning to meet Aang and Katara on their landing.

"Hey, Uncle!" The airbender waved cheerfully from his perch atop Appa's head, while Katara leaned out of the howdah when they touched down on the sands. "Uncle Iroh," she greeted warmly, smiling. And he beamed. Iroh loved it when Zuko's friends called him _uncle_. It just reinforced that his nephew had found a family in them, such as Iroh always wanted for him.

"You two made excellent time!" Iroh congratulated, marveling as he always did at the swiftness of the legendary bison. Aang shrugged modestly, jumping down from Appa's head to help Katara from her seat. And Iroh was struck again by the changes four years had wrought in the Avatar especially.

Aang was now almost a head taller than his wife, hard muscle just beginning to fill out his lanky frame and pad the folds of his airbender robes. By contrast, Katara did not look much different from when Iroh first encountered her on his nephew's futile hunt, her eyes still round and blue as ever, even if her face had lost some of the softness of youth. She still kept her willowy figure though, and Iroh recalled a little wistfully how he had once wished her for Zuko. But seeing what a handsome couple these two made now, he was happy with the way things had turned out. If only Mai could be reconciled with his nephew…

"Well, we _do_ have an urgent problem on our hands," Katara was saying, and Iroh blinked, lost in his musings. "Sorry," she amended upon seeing his reaction, and at a gentle squeeze of the hand from Aang. "I know she's your niece."

"No offense taken," Iroh held up his hands to reassure her. "She can be … problematic." That was putting it mildly.

"Your letter was pretty short on detail," Aang observed. _For fear it might be intercepted_, Iroh added silently. "So what do you have for us?"

And he told them.

* * *

His wife was there to greet him at the harbor, along with an honor guard of imperial firebenders and their respective palanquins and bearers, when Zuko returned to the capital. He had sent word ahead of his arrival, and was encouraged to see that Mai waited for him even when his ship arrived late in the day.

His encouragement didn't last long, when she greeted him coldly and barely spoke five words to him before they were bundled into their respective palanquins and on their way back to the palace. He got to spend the ride worrying what to make of her attitude and how she had injured her hand — a simple mistake, she snapped when he tried to hold it, only to discover the hard ridges of barely healed cuts scored in her palm and fingers.

But Mai didn't make mistakes, least of all with her knives. And Zuko wondered with dread if she had heard the rumors that sprung up in his departure from the Earth Kingdom, about a liaison with June…

The bounty hunter had certainly arranged his capture to maximum scandal. And just like she probably intended, Zuko was discovered before he could accomplish the contortions needed to unlock his handcuffs. He guessed he was supposed to pick the key up with his toes and somehow get it between his teeth to free himself, if June wasn't just lying when she said that he could. The cuffs did leave him some give, and if he were a circus freak like Ty Lee or willing to dislocate his own shoulder, he might have been able to do it.

As it was, a chambermaid ended up walking in on him in the midst of his efforts, only to drop her freshly laundered towels and run screaming for the hotel manager. His reaction was a little more understated, as he recognized Zuko and helped free him from the cuffs, while the maid fetched new clothes for him, and presented these with her fearful apologies.

He supposed he owed them much for their hospitality. It didn't stop Zuko wanting to burn his stupid face off, when the manager congratulated him on his "conquest". Zuko wondered just what about being handcuffed to a piece of furniture spoke victory to this man, but managed to restrain himself to snapping that it was a misunderstanding. The knowing smirk Zuko got in reply was enough to tell him he hadn't heard the last of this, and indeed, he hadn't.

June had paid off their room and left him a ticket and some traveling money at the front desk, he discovered. Zuko took the boat all the way to Fire Fountain City, before he discovered that exagerated accounts of his deeds had actually beaten him home. Apparently the most popular version claimed that June had handcuffed him to a bed, and he escaped by having such vigorous sex that the cuffs snapped.

Of course, no one related this story to his face. Instead, he got to overhear it from gossiping employees at the post office, when he rented a messenger hawk to write Mai and his court chamberlain, from dock workers when he approached them to ask where he might find a ship to the capital…

And Zuko resisted the urge to put a flaming fist through the nearest solid object. Why did people have to be such rumormongers? He was already in hot water with Mai, he didn't need this right now!

He fumed again just thinking about it, but made a deliberate effort to tamp down on his anger when they arrived home, and Mai dismissed their guards and servants at the doors. She grabbed his wrist and led Zuko in silence back to the royal apartments. He kept quiet despite a growing sense of unease, knowing Mai would not want to argue in front of the imperial firebenders and palace staff they passed on their way, but couldn't help speaking when he saw just where she was leading him. "What —"

"The servants leave these rooms alone," Mai reminded him unnecessarily, for it was by Zuko's orders that they did. She threw open the iron door — it groaned on its hinges — and ushered him into Azula's abandoned bedroom, only to pull it closed behind them both. "Less chance we'll be overheard."

He looked around a little warily when they entered, taking in the fine layer of dust that coated the stone floor and every article of furniture in the room. It danced in the golden light of late afternoon that shone in through the window screens, and Zuko was reminded uncomfortably of the beach house, a dead and empty space now, though it hadn't always been so.

But he pushed those memories aside to follow Mai, when she crossed the room and climbed the shallow steps to the foot of the bed. She gripped one of the slender marble pillars supporting the canopy, and stood glaring into the great red disk set into the headboard like a swollen sun. Several seconds of painful silence elapsed before Zuko worked up the courage to speak. "I don't know what you heard, but I didn't sleep w—"

"Save your breath," Mai sighed in exasperation, her hand dropping when she turned to face him. "I know you didn't have kinky bondage sex with some bounty hunter, okay?"

"Then —" he started, before Mai preempted him with, "She's pregnant."

"What, _June?_" Zuko said quickly, bewildered.

Mai looked as if she'd like to cut him, when she spoke his sister's name like a curse.

She might as well have cut him. His face went slack with shock, and time slowed to an excruciating crawl. Zuko could have counted his own heartbeats in that timeless moment, and still barely managed to sit sideways on the edge of the bed before his legs gave out. Oh gods, this couldn't —

No.

He bent forward with shoulders slumped, hid his face in his hands and gripped his own hair against the sting of tears — and chided himself for a fool. Of course this wouldn't end in any but the worst possible outcome, he thought bitterly, then stopped.

No, it _could_ be worse, he reminded himself. She could be dead, she could still die…

"You're _sure?_" he whispered hopelessly at last, glancing up at Mai in desperation.

His wife just stared coldly back, giving her silence time to sink in before she replied, "Still think she didn't plan this?"

"Of _course_ **not!**" Zuko burst out, letting his hands drop when he sat up as if stung. His heart ached when he recalled accounts of her state at Kyoshi Island, Ty Lee's reticence, and realized the significance of the timing. How she cried when she found out she was pregnant. "She probably just wishes she could **forget** this ever happened!" _Just like me_. "And now she _can't_."

"Do you think she'll get rid of it?" Mai demanded, and Zuko sucked in a quick breath.

He wanted to throw up just thinking of her getting an abortion — she was still his little sister, after everything — but finally pressed his lips together and nodded painfully. "Probably … yeah," he admitted, staring at the floor. His eyes burned with tears, even if only one could still produce them, when he spoke softly, "She's always — done what she has to to survive."

"Well," Mai said slowly, watching him, "I guess this is one time we can be glad of her ruthless streak."

He glanced away. "I don't want to talk about this anymore."

Her face hardened where she stood with arms crossed before her, when Mai remarked, "Then maybe you want to talk about what happens if she _doesn't_."

"What?" Zuko looked quickly up at her.

"Do you think she would use this child against us?" Mai asked, her eyes like chips of flint. "Or Lu Ten?"

"How would — she even —" Zuko demanded in disbelief, when what he really wanted to say was _What's wrong with you?_ and _When did you become this person?_

"As proof of what you did, for one," his wife spoke coldly. "Incest is a crime in the Fire Nation, in case you forgot. What better way to discredit you?"

His jaw clenched. "She would be discredited too —"

"Not if you forced yourself on her," Mai flatly contradicted.

And Zuko sprang to his feet as if under physical threat. "I _told_ you, I didn't —"

"And you can tell me 'til you're blue in the face," Mai hissed, dropping her stance to clench fists at her sides, "but it still won't matter what you **did**, just what people _think_ you did!" She threw her hand out as if to indicate invisible others. "And there's every chance now they're going to start asking, so you'd better come up with some answers. 'Cause if you tell them what you told me, we're all going to suffer for it."

"She couldn't — prove that it's mine," was all Zuko could offer in reply. He hated himself just for saying it.

"And you couldn't prove that it's _not_. Besides the fact you're a terrible liar." Mai turned from him, her brows furrowed in thought, to descend the shallow steps and put some space between them.

"Even if there's every chance it isn't…" She stopped, and looked sidelong at him. "I still don't get why you're so convinced," she spoke without emotion. "Besides the obvious."

Zuko flinched atop the low stair, and dropped his gaze. "She wouldn't be with someone else," he contradicted quietly.

"Why?" Mai glared daggers at him. "Because what you have is just so special?"

"Gods _damn_ it, Mai!" he snapped, stung by her sarcasm. "You **know** how she is with guys! You saw her at that party."

"Didn't seem to hurt her chances with _you_ —"

"Stop it, alright?" he demanded, and losing patience, moved to follow her. "I said I'm _sorry_, and I **meant** it! I'd apologize a _hundred_ times if it could change what happened, but it **can't!**" he insisted, grabbing her elbow when she made to walk away. "And torturing me about it isn't going to change that either."

"Torturing you?" Mai echoed scornfully. "You really think that's what this is about? But _why not?_" she sneered with such venom that Zuko let go of her in shock. "Because **everything's** about you.

"Are you really so wrapped up in your own personal tragedy that you haven't even **considered** how this will affect me, or Lu Ten?" she went on to demand with a pointer finger to his chest, and Zuko felt like screaming. He _just_ found out about this! Mai shook her head as if to reject the argument before he made it, and answered her own question, "Why _would_ you? You only **forget** you're his father half the time!"

"What?!" Zuko cried in outrage, but she wasn't finished.

"Just like you forget I'm your _wife_," she accused, eyes flashing. "It's bad enough you act with no thought to your own position; you could at least give a thought to ours."

"Like it's so _easy_ being Fire Lord and a father, or a **husband** too?" Zuko shot back with an angry thrust of his hand. "But I make time for you and our son, I keep you safe and show you love! And I've never been unfaithful up to now," he defended, "even though I've had plenty of chances! I'm doing the best I can —"

"Well, your _best_ isn't good enough," Mai cut across him, fingers clenching as if they longed to lay hold of her knives. "Say what you will about your father, he never ran off sowing _scandal_ and making **bastards** —"

"No, he was too busy abusing the _shit_ out of my **sister** for that, wasn't he?" Zuko shouted and tossed his hands up as if to dismiss her argument, but Mai just turned away in disgust.

"You're a _fool_," she whispered harshly, the back of her bare neck flushed red in the light of the setting sun. "And I can't talk to you when you're like this."

"When **I'm** like this?" Zuko indicated himself in disbelief. "_You're_ supposed to be the rational one!"

Mai turned as if to look at him, but stopped short of that acknowledgement. "And you were supposed to love and honor me," she spoke slowly, "so long as we both shall live." Her words still hit him with the force of a blow, and Zuko lost the will to fight in an instant. Until all he felt was empty, and alone.

She glanced to him as if she felt the change. "I guess we both disappointed each other, didn't we?"

"Where are you going?" Zuko said more gently, when she made to leave.

Mai didn't stop. "To give you time to think," she explained in crossing the room. "And hope you use it as intended." She pulled the heavy door open with a squeaking of hinges, and paused on the threshold to look back in the lamplight from the hall beyond. "Talk to me when you have a plan," she said simply.

The implication was clear. _And not before_.

"Don't _you?_" Zuko tried, with his best attempt at a smile. It probably ended up looking more like a grimace, and her answering quirk of the lips was less than friendly.

"I do," his wife said simply, in a tone that indicated, _but you wouldn't like it_.

"Mai," he spoke hoarsely, his throat tight with remorse. "I'm sorry this happened."

Her nostrils flared and Mai glanced quickly down, but her voice was steady when she replied, "If that's all you are," she looked straight at him like a challenge, "I don't think there's much left to say about it." And she left.

Mai closed the door behind her. Shadows lengthened on the dusty floor. The still-vibrant reds and golds and oranges of his sister's bedroom muted with the sun's descent, and finer details were lost to the encroaching dark.

Zuko sat down on the topmost of the shallow steps up to her bed, with knees propped in front of him and his head in his hands. He couldn't bring himself to sit on her bed again. This was one of the few places in the palace where he would be left alone, but he still felt like he shouldn't be here. Just like he had that night he barged in on Azula sleeping, to demand why she lied to their father…

He had thought nothing of it at the time. They grew up only two years apart. And even if Zuko bristled at her stealing his stuff or bothering him when he didn't want her around, he could admit neither one of them had ever given much thought to the other's privacy.

It was just one more thing that changed while he was banished, even if he only realized it that night. It felt wrong to be there. And the way she reacted to his accusations, her tone of voice and mannerisms, it felt … wrong.

Zuko knew now _what_ had changed, in the three years she spent alone with their father. He saw the signs he should have recognized so much earlier, the seductive behaviors inappropriate to her age. Behaviors their father had trained into her.

If he hadn't been so blind, maybe none of this would have happened…

He took a deep breath and let it out with arms clasped firmly around his middle, before he could look any further into that dark place. He tried to do what Mai suggested, to think about the future and how he would prepare to meet it.

Instead, all he could think of was how warm and solid Azula felt, curled against him that night on Ember Island. For everything that came before and everything that would come after, in that moment on the edge of sleep, he felt almost … content. That wasn't something he was used to feeling around his sister, at all.

What they had done was wrong on so many levels. He had a wife, and she was his sister and Azula was — Zuko couldn't bring himself to agree with what Mai and his father called it, but even he could admit now that his motives were not what they should have been.

He had an advantage in all this that Azula didn't. He knew what a healthy relationship looked like. He knew what sex was supposed to be. That was how he knew that what they did, it wasn't an act of love.

It was an act of hate.

Except that somewhere in the midst of their furious coupling, something changed. Or he never would have fallen asleep beside her. That wasn't something Zuko had felt comfortable doing for a long time, almost longer than he could remember.

It was an act of hate, and his uncle — his mother — taught him that hate brought nothing but destruction. And yet…

They made a life.

Even now, he could barely breathe just thinking of it. He was supposed to be thinking of it. Mai demanded he come up with a plan, but she didn't understand. He already knew how this would end.

There were a lot of factors conspiring against this baby ever being born. It was a product of incest, and might be so sickly or deformed that it died inside its mother. Its mother… Azula was a fugitive from two nations, one of which had put a death sentence on her head. And her condition wouldn't stay their hand. That was no kind of life to bring a baby into, and she would know it.

But the real reason he knew how this would end, was that _he_ was her baby's father. And Azula hated him. She didn't want his help, his care, his company. She didn't want his love…

_Don't follow me_.

She didn't want any part of him, Zuko thought painfully. So what could she possibly want with his child?

* * *

They knew who she was, Azula quickly discovered. It was not ignorance of her name and deeds that accounted for her being left unbound, but certain knowledge on the part of the tribe that she wasn't running anywhere any time soon. A few days after waking, Azula had still managed little more than to walk unassisted for increasing lengths of time, her strength sapped by relapses into fever and the sometimes disorienting side-effects of the drug. She explored the village on its small island of boggy ground, circling the edges of the huts with Anyu at her elbow. And an infuriating sense of helplessness simmering in the pit of her stomach.

Most of the village and her own caretaker had only been informed of her identity when Azula woke, and it became clear she would survive her illness. She supposed she had been outed by those members of the tribe who fought on the Day of Black Sun, and whose incarceration she had overseen. The irony was not lost on Azula.

There were never many tribesmen about for her daily exercise, mostly just elderly villagers who watched them from their porches, and young children and their mothers. Though Annie explained that the men were out hunting or training, Azula rather suspected the healer planned their excursions to avoid contact between herself and them. Her presence here was a source of much debate among the tribe, Azula was tactfully given to understand. And though she expressed a desire to have a voice in these discussions, Anyu had so far been unable to tell her more. Or so she said.

Azula doubted this silence or the care she received would last much longer though. As soon as she was recovered enough to pose a potential threat to them, the tribesmen would be forced to act…

Of course, that begged the question of why they had bothered to heal her in the first place, when they could have just left her to die. The healer explained that she had contracted what their tribe called "swamp fever," and Azula guessed was a particularly vicious form of malaria. Most natives developed an immunity to it, but even among the tribe, pregnant women were still susceptible — and subsequently took precautions like sleeping under mosquito nets and rubbing their skin down with a foul-smelling ointment such as Azula now wore to repel the insects.

Azula had been found and carried back to the village by one of their men, whom Annie explained could bend the water in vines to attack any trespassers to the swamp. The pot-bellied tribesman had ducked his gray head into the clinic on the second day, as Azula was about to doze off from her earlier walk, to apologize for frightening her. He bit his lower lip when he smiled, and spoke with a bashfulness so at odds with his state of undress that Azula could not manage much more than to nod once in acceptance, staring openly. He explained that he had not meant to hurt her, only to restrain her and stop her from burning more of the swamp.

He also offered to let her meditate at the banyan grove tree, whatever that was, before Annie shooed him out with the warning that his offer was premature. And then glanced worriedly at Azula, like the princess wouldn't know what she was talking about.

Azula sighed, sitting down tailor style on the soft moss that blanketed the ground near the water's edge when she began seeing double, as she inevitably did after walking long enough. It was a side-effect of the quinine, her caretaker explained, but occurred less frequently now that her dose was being reduced. Annie took a seat beside her and chatted happily on about the swamp and the history of her tribe, and Azula found the forbearance to endure it only by reminding herself that at least this one wasn't as intrusive as Rai — _The cook_, she corrected herself sternly.

Suddenly, quite independent of any actual interest on her part, something the woman was saying registered. "Wait," Azula spoke shortly, holding up a hand to interrupt her, and Anyu looked startled that she was even paying attention. "You're originally from the Northern Water Tribe?" It would certainly explain why the healer looked so different from the rest of the villagers, whose eyes were the green, gray, and brown common to citizens of the Earth Kingdom.

"No, my _Ma_ was from the Northern Tribe," Anyu patiently corrected her, warming to the prospect of a two-way conversation. "She settled here and married my Pa. He's been gone fer a long time, but she jest passed a few years ago. She taught me ever'thing I know about healin'."

"That explains why you can waterbend, but what about the rest of the villagers?" Azula demanded, bothered anew by the oddity of stumbling across a whole colony of waterbenders in the middle of the Earth Kingdom.

"Oh goodness, did'n I say?" Annie blinked in surprise, leaning forward with her tan arms draped over her knees. Azula pulled her shoulders straight and laid her hands palm-up on her thighs in a position she often adopted for meditation, hoping to ease the ache in her back. "Our whole village is descended from im'grents from the Northern Tribe. Hunnerds and hunnerds a years ago, a big group of 'em went explorin' for a new place to live. There were some as kept sailin' 'til they reached the South Pole, but our ancestors decided to stay here, when they found all this standin' water.

"It is kinda funny, now ya mention it," Anyu cocked her head to add. "We innermarried so many Earth Kingdomers over the years that we look more like them now. But we still bend water."

"It's not that funny," Azula flatly contradicted. "There are theories in the Fire Nation about how bending is passed on. Most scientists believe the _ability_ to bend is inherited, but the element you bend depends on your culture and upbringing."

Annie nodded enthusiastically. "That makes perfeck sense. We never forgot where we come from. We raise our chillun to value fam'ly, jest like we always done in the Water Tribes."

"Is that why you don't seem to hate me so much as the rest of your countrymen?" Azula asked lightly, steering the conversation back onto ground that pertained to her personally. "Because you're not really Earth Kingdom, but from the Water Tribes?"

The healer absorbed her question with a thoughtful frown. "That's part of it, I s'pose. But really…" She exhaled deeply in an understated sigh. "It's purdy hard to hate someone so miserable's you was, when Huu dragged ya back here half-dead." Azula scowled at her, but Anyu continued undeterred, "You was shiverin', shakin' and burnin' up with fever, could'n breathe enough to do much more'n whisper. Still askin' after some girl and yer brother…"

Azula stiffened in surprise. "It's nuthin' tuh be 'shamed of," the waterbender said gently, pity written clearly on the dusky oval of her face. "We all want our fam'ly 'round us, when we's scared or in pain."

She glanced away at the familiar burning behind her eyes, but made no reply. What was there to say about it to someone like Anyu anyway? Oddly enough, Azula didn't find herself thinking of these people as peasants very often, even if they wore next to nothing and walked around with their bare feet caked in mud. Perhaps it was the lack of any privileged ruling class that didn't lend the tribe to such comparisons. Even so, their way of life here was alien enough that there seemed little to gain by explaining herself or any part of her situation to them.

It wouldn't have mattered even if they were Fire Nation, Azula knew. Her family was royalty, they weren't like other people…

"I was fleeing pursuit when I came to the swamp," she spoke finally instead, ignoring her caretaker's comment to fix her with an unblinking gaze. "What have you told the earthbenders who were chasing me, all this time I was laid up?"

Annie pursed her generous lips, whether hesitant to answer or to let Azula change the subject, she couldn't tell. "Purdy much nothin', 'til we decide what to do with ya," she finally admitted, raising her bare shoulders in a shrug. "There's hunnerds of square miles of swamp fer 'em to cover. And since we offered 'em guides in the past week, we can make sure they on'y see what we _want _'em to see."

And Azula stared, impressed despite herself at the craftiness of that move. Even if she still didn't know why they would bother to shelter her at all. Annie smiled grimly as if guessing the train of her thoughts, and added, "'Course, if'n they ventured in alone, they might get lost followin' their visions. This way, no 'un has to get hurt —"

"Visions?" She stopped at Azula's exclamation, when the princess shifted to face her on the damp knees of the cut-off pants freshly cleaned and returned to her, and demanded, "Other people … _see things_ here?"

"Why sure," Anyu replied, visibly taken aback, "did'n _you?_"

Azula exhaled as abruptly as if she'd been punched in the gut. She wasn't crazy. Or at least, no worse than when she escaped from the asylum. These visions were caused by the swamp somehow, and would stop when she left it. Granted, she had not seen Mai or her brother since her fever broke and she recovered consciousness, but she anticipated their return with dread and other, less identifiable emotions all the same.

She had begun to think the medication might be suppressing her hallucinations, but realized now that wasn't right. Or she would not have woken yesterday to find Ursa sitting at her bedside, leaning over Azula to stroke her damp hair back from her face and hum a lullaby, the way she had seen their mother do for Zuko whenever he was sick in bed. Azula never used to get sick.

"I s'pose it mighta scared ya sum, seein' dead folks and such," Annie cheerfully observed, and Azula blinked at her, uncomprehending. "The swamp sends us visions of people we lost, jest when we need 'em the most. Now ya found the help ya needed, I bet ya don't see 'em no more," she added slyly.

But Azula just looked out over still water choked with algae, and considered that the people in her visions weren't dead. _Not dead_, she thought dully. _Just lost to me_.

The wet _squelch_ of approaching footsteps broke her reverie, and she glanced over her shoulder to see one of Anyu's sons approaching, the squat one with the pot-belly and perpetual stubble. It was easy to forget sometimes how old the waterbender actually was, until you realized her children were all grown men.

"What brings ya home early, Tho?" Annie climbed to her feet and stepped forward to greet him fondly. "Catch ya some skunk fish? Those make good eatin' if ya cook 'em up right."

"No, Ma," he sighed, crossing arms over his sagging chest. "The villages is meetin' at the banyan grove. We gots ta decide what to do with … _yer patient_," he grit out irritably, clearly still holding a grudge for the month he spent in Fire Nation custody. Azula supposed that took some of the sting out of being referred to as if she were not present. As was his habit, the dumpy tribesman avoided even looking at her, when Azula clambered to her feet.

"So soon?" Azula could hear the frown in her voice. "She ain't strong enough to leave yet, Tho." And Azula smiled bitterly to herself over Annie's shoulder. As if they would just let her leave…

"Ah told 'em," he grumbled, shrugging beefy shoulders in defeat. "But them land-lovers is gettin' restluss. Due don't think they'll be content to foller our guides in circles much longer."

"_Due_," his mother snorted with familiar contempt. "That man could'n think his way out of a sinkhole. Still, if they's called a council, I guess he ain't the only one who feels that way."

Tho nodded gravely. "They want her there this time." His round gray eyes glanced briefly to Azula. "To make account a herself."

Anyu turned back to face her and said, "Well, you wanted a voice in discussions." She spread her hands almost in apology. "It seems yer gonna get that much."

"It seems," Azula echoed coolly, unconvinced.

Even so-called selfless acts routinely had a selfish motive, Azula knew, and were rarely sustained when the cost of satisfying that selfish motive became too great. They may have saved her life, but Azula suspected their generosity only extended so far. Now that they were under threat, she supposed she would see just how far.

"C'mon, Yer Highness," Tho acknowledged her grudgingly at last, turning to lead them with a gesture of his hand. "They's waitin' for ya."

Annie linked arms with her, and Azula, though irritated by the implication that she needed support, did not bother to shrug her off. Instead she followed her scantily clad captor along with most of the village to the heart of the swamp, walking lockstep with a waterbender toward the next part of her journey.

And possibly the last.


	17. A Kindness

He couldn't believe he was reduced to this. Again. It was intolerable. His father lost the war, lost his throne and his bending and soon enough, would lose his life. Yet so long as he held answers Zuko needed, the Lord of the Fire Nation himself was obliged to suffer his cruel taunts, his presence, the awful knowledge of what he'd done…

His flame headpiece weighed heavier than it had in some time, and Zuko let out a long, calming breath to focus himself. And he reflected on the circumstances that brought him to the windowless and sparsely furnished waiting room of the prison infirmary for a second time since the night he discovered Ozai's most disgusting crime.

Zuko had met with much discontent on his return to court. It turned out his absence while working with June, long and unannounced as it was, had thrown the business of government into near-chaos. The members of his council had picked up some of the slack with regard to petitioners, inspections and reforms, new laws to be signed and funds to be allocated…

But they could not act fully without approval from the throne, and Mai had served in his stead with reluctance and a pronounced lack of patience with the additional duties foisted on her. On top of this, it seemed his councilors had cherry-picked their assignments, and now he had to deal with the inevitable accusations of favoritism and restitutions to be made.

It had gotten bad enough that Mai even put aside her resentment at his inaction with regards to his sister, and met with Zuko at every meal and in his spare time to catch him up on what he'd missed — both at court, and outside of it.

The heads of noble houses, ministers and councilors, and several of his court officials had been busily meeting in his absence, they claimed to maintain the workings of government. But Mai was suspicious of the sudden upswing in talks between the usually contentious factions. She disliked that she could discover so little of the actual content of these meetings. The councilors from Ember Island were fomenting discontent, she informed him, though Zuko could have told her that from their unsubtle comments about him "larking off" with some bounty hunter.

The flash of flames in the trough before him had been enough to cow them then, but Zuko was eventually forced to admit he had been searching for Azula, her escape by now an open secret among the members of his court. It was the first time he acknowledged she was at large in open court, but Zuko felt no sense of relief. Not the least because his ministers and the assorted nobles did not seem nearly worried enough at the threat she represented to his rule.

Zuko found himself wondering how many of them would throw him over for his war-mongering sister. He may forever feel a deep and abiding regret for what he did to her that night, for what she suffered at their father's hands, but he could not let that blind him to the fact that she would never be the Lord their nation needed. Did his councilors imagine she would greet them with open arms, should she gain the throne? That she would pardon anyone who threw their lot in with her hated brother, even if only to advance their own interests?

Perhaps they foolishly hoped to find her more pliable and easily manipulated than him. Because of her stay in the asylum, though how many believed this was _warranted_ was more debatable, or because of her sex. Perhaps they hoped to marry Azula off to one of their own number in exchange for their support. A consort beholden to their interests who would limit her in turn, and get a son on her to be raised as slave to their agenda…

His mouth twisted bitterly when he imagined how they might react to learning she was already pregnant, if she even still was. Not that this was by any means the biggest hole in their hypothetical plan, when she was entirely likely to kill her own husband on her wedding night —

Zuko closed his eyes where he leaned with arms crossed against a counter, to forget the vivid image of fire-daggers in her hands. He tried to avoid wondering (again) just what their father hoped to gain, when he undertook to "train" her in such unspeakable fashion. Did it even once occur to him that he would effectively ruin her for any kind of sane, functional relationship? But why would it, when that was something Ozai had never been capable of himself?

It was all speculation at this point anyway, not that that made his worries any easier to dismiss. Not when awful possibilities of a different sort had forced him to seek out the monster who abused his sister in every possible way, and had the nerve to call it "training". For himself, Zuko would rather see Ozai dead than give him the satisfaction of holding information over his head, but for Azula… He would endure it.

She wouldn't even be in this danger in the first place, if he hadn't — hadn't lost control.

Mai had mentioned it almost in passing, one of several times they met in the past week. It might have been breakfast. He only remembered Lu Ten wasn't present, one of a handful of times since Mai came home that they didn't share table as a family. The Dai Li agent secreted among the asylum staff had fled Ember Island subsequent to his fellow's capture, Mai told him. And it seemed the spy had stolen Azula's patient records while he was at it.

Zuko really didn't like to think what a rogue organization like the Dai Li would want with accounts of her psychological state. But Mai raised the more practical issue that his sister's medical history had also turned up missing, when this would be stored in secure palace archives with other personal information pertaining to the royal family. And Mai had lightly observed that without any record of Azula's physical state either before or after her starvation attempt, it was hard to say what effect a pregnancy would have on her weakened body.

He couldn't help staring at the offhand comment, but Mai had just continued eating cool-as-you-please. And Zuko was forced to admit that his wife was wholly likely to wish injury or worse on Azula, in light of her condition. But try as he might, he couldn't blame Mai for it, especially after he learned from the captain of their palace guard just _how_ she had injured her hand. He knew the hurt he inflicted by betraying her this way was immeasurably worse.

Zuko sat at her right hand at table that morning. (He was convinced now it must have been breakfast, for Mai was never much of a morning person.) He reached over to hold it in his left, halfway to her mouth, and she was forced to put down her chopsticks. Zuko turned her palm over, stomach churning with guilt when he gently thumbed the hard ridges of scars their royal physician said Mai would bear for the rest of her life, though she had recovered full dexterity in her hand.

"Mai…" He looked intently at his wife, willing her to believe it. "It's going to be alright."

"No thanks to you," she flatly replied, the legs of her chair scraping discordantly against the tiled floor when she stood to withdraw her hand from his, and leave the table. And leave him to dark thoughts of a whole other character.

She couldn't really die in childbirth, could she? That only ever happened to women in dusty old histories or the heroines of tragic romances, and Azula was anything but. Except… Didn't Uncle's wife die that way? His cousin Lu Ten's mother? But he seemed to recall she was Earth Kingdom, and their medical arts were not as advanced as in the Fire Nation —

_She's in the Earth Kingdom _now_, you fool_, he berated himself, snorting out flames with his next breath before he stood straight from leaning against the counter, to relieve a cramp in his back. _And hardly likely to get the care she needs when she's a fugitive from them and you both_.

But surely it wouldn't come to that, anyway. Hadn't he been convinced just a few days ago that she would — would take care of it? Even if she couldn't or wouldn't, Mai hinted — and he was inclined to agree — that the particular origins of their baby and the particular weaknesses of her damaged body made it unlikely Azula would carry to term. Except a miscarriage could be just as dangerous for her, if it happened while she was alone, or among her enemies.

He sighed heavily and ran a hand over his face, before crossing the waiting room to slump into one of a row of uncomfortable chairs. Like he could just walk away from the image of Azula bent and bleeding, helpless and crying and cursing his name. Bad enough he had to see it in his nightmares before his fresh resort to the sedative herbs chased those away, now he had to see it in his waking hours too?

That might still be a less painful prospect than considering whether or not he _wanted_ her to lose the baby, or abort it. He could think of no good way this could end for either of them, and the baby — Even if it was whole enough to be born and live a full life, what kind of life would that be, with Azula for a mother?

But it was pointless to keep dwelling on this until he knew more, Zuko stopped himself. That was why he was here. He had sent for the doctors who treated Azula during her starvation attempt, and still awaited their arrival. But he knew well enough that her medical records from before that time would stay missing, until he went to the source. Ozai probably hid them to cover his abuse, but Zuko promised himself he would have that information, one way or another.

He just hoped to find his father in a more cooperative mood than last time, a vain hope if ever there was one. He sat watching the door to the sickroom, a low-ceilinged and equally windowless but much larger space, he recalled, carved out of the hillside to take advantage of the heat of the earth, and partitioned by standing screens. And he remembered that last interview, bitter as any of their encounters had proved since Zuko first renounced Ozai.

Shortly after Mai returned home, but before Zuko set off for Kyoshi Island, his buoyant mood was ruined when she broached the subject of his father. Mai explained, as if Zuko hadn't already heard this from his jailers, that Ozai was asking to be released to house arrest. The warden himself supported this request, in light of his mortal injuries and the persistence of his illness, but he required Zuko's consent.

Zuko had written back telling the warden in no uncertain terms that his father was to be confined until his dying breath. And he should count himself lucky Zuko allowed him treatment to sustain his life and manage his pain at all, in light of his heinous crimes. But Mai pointed out when he told her this that he was being shortsighted.

Certainly, it would be unthinkable to actually grant his request. But for Zuko to shun his dying father and commit such bitter sentiments to paper would only lend weight to the rumors that it was he who burned Ozai in the first place. That he wished his father dead and had ordered him quietly disposed of, because a public execution would expose the abuse and neglect Ozai had supposedly suffered in prison. That the once-Fire Lord held damning information that Zuko would see him take to his funeral pyre…

Considering the first of these rumors at least was indisputably true, Mai observed, it would be to their benefit to arrange a visit. Zuko might do Ozai the courtesy of denying his request in person, and be seen to exercise his responsibilities as acting head of the royal family. Little though he liked it, Zuko was heartened when she volunteered to accompany him. Until Mai made it clear her presence was meant not so much for emotional support, as a deterrent to any more damaging incidents like the one that landed his father in the infirmary in the first place.

Ire still burned in the pit of his stomach, when he recalled Ozai's reaction to his unannounced guests…

_Ozai barely noted his son's entrance, but lifted his head where he lay when Mai entered his line of sight, wincing with the pain of his burns, still bandaged and seeping weeks later. Even so, sunken eyes lit up in his wasted face, shorn of the beard that had hidden the ravages of his sickness. Ozai struggled to sit up, leaning back against his bunched pillow and the headboard behind when his bandaged arms shook with the effort of supporting his weight. _

_And Zuko stopped short beside his wife, shocked at the undeniable evidence of his deterioration, glaringly exposed in bright overhead light. The sickroom smelled like one of those run-down army hospitals Zuko had condemned and closed at war's end, though Ozai was the only occupant. Mai wrinkled her nose in disgust._

_His dying father snorted as if at some private joke. The corners of his mouth twitched with amusement, and he observed to no one in particular, "Boy brings his _fair_ Lady to see me. That took some balls. Considering what I could __**tell**__ her…"_

_Zuko scowled at the thinly veiled threat, but Mai just watched the deposed Fire Lord without expression, and his father watched her eagerly back. His sadistic grin grew until it threatened to split his face, when he guessed from her silence that she caught his meaning._

_"Ohoho my _gods_," Ozai wheezed, his voice choked with laughter and left hand glistening red with burns, where he clutched his middle. He looked to Zuko in equal parts surprise and delight; he looked like his birthday came early. _

_"You told your __**wife? **__She's going to _kill you_ in your __**sleep!**__" Naturally, he found the prospect hilarious. Ozai cried tears of mirth, while Zuko glanced to Mai in apology. But she just stared at his father a second longer, before turning sharply on her heel._

_"You're on your own," she spoke brusquely to Zuko, and exited the room without a glance behind when she spoke in parting, "Try not to do anything stupid."_

_"_Thanks_," Zuko snapped at his chuckling father, gripping his forehead in anticipation of just how much more ground he'd have to make up now._

_"I must have missed the part where it's _my_ job to make your life easier," Ozai sneered, laying his head back against the headboard to lazily observe his son._ Yeah, _Zuko thought bitterly_, along with every other lesson in parenting, _ever_.

_"Your request for house arrest is _denied_," Zuko said instead, with no little satisfaction. "Waste away in here for all I care," he spoke low, poisonously. "It's no more than you deserve."_

_"Are you sure _— _you want to do that?" Ozai asked, his breath catching when Zuko turned to leave. "You may have been stupid enough to confess to _her_. But I doubt _—_ you made your tryst public knowledge." Zuko stopped with back turned and fists clenched. He could practically feel his father smirking behind him._

_"Even locked away in here," he drew a shallow breath that rattled in his burned and bandaged chest, "there are plenty of people I could tell."_

_"Go ahead and try it," Zuko called his bluff, shooting a warning glare over his shoulder. "Like anyone would ever believe you."_

_Ozai gave him an appraising look, and chortled darkly. "Oh, I don't know," he rasped, his tone otherwise almost conversational. "I'd say your attempt on — my life might convince them. Don't get me wrong. I understand. I'd probably look elsewhere too," he offered, falsely comforting even if his yellow eyes glittered with malice. His thin fingers curled like claws, where his hands lay empty in his lap. _

_"Even with that scar. You're still prettier than her…"_

_"Gods _damn_ it!" Zuko turned on him with fists clenched, and was startled when Ozai actually flinched. Such a small motion, but what it betrayed was unthinkable._

_"Do you even realize this is the _first time_ I've brought Mai here since we were married?" he demanded, fury pounding in his head even if his voice spoke tears. "_Two years_," he brandished two fingers at his father in accusation, "and you probably never even __**saw **__her 'til today —"_

_"I've seen her," Ozai admitted in annoyance, clearly wanting to head off an argument._

_And Zuko stopped, startled. "But you didn't even know who Ty Lee was," he protested, and his father exhaled what might have been a grudging sigh._

_"Ty Lee was not — your betrothed," he said simply. But Mai hadn't been either. He proposed a few months after he was crowned, and as far as Zuko knew, she had never visited his father in prison. _

_His confusion must have shown, for Ozai explained, "When Azula brought you home from Ba Sing Se — she suggested I formalize a match — between you and her friend. I know. I was surprised too," he interjected, at the look on Zuko's face. "The girl wasn't even a bender —"_

_"Neither was Mom," Zuko objected, but without any heat. He never would have guessed this. Sure, Azula arranged that stupid dinner date in Ba Sing Se, but that was hardly comparable to _arranging his marriage…

_His father shot him an irritable look, as if to say, _Are you going to let me tell it, or not?_ "Your mother had — her family to recommend her," he contradicted weakly. "Whereas this girl — came from a lot of spineless toadies and social climbers. Who haven't produced a bender in generations." His lip curled with contempt. "Well enough for a mere companion to the princess. Less acceptable in a royal consort._

_"Azula argued her case. That she was a good influence on you. That she would moderate — your more glaring faults." Ozai grimaced. "Should I ever need to trust you with a position of power. That what's more — you were besotted with each other. And would not even need convincing. Finally," he sighed, blinking tiredly, "that a union with her childhood friend — would bind you to your sister's influence. And through her, to _me_."_

_Zuko was by this time listening intently, and felt no desire to interrupt for once. He had always wondered what Azula and his father talked about. That it might have been _him_ was unexpected, to say the least._

_"I must admit," Ozai continued obligingly, "the prospect of __**not**__ having to guard your every word and step — was tempting. I was willing to consider it. I arranged that Azula should send for her. Then meet me at a shaded peristyle. Where we might observe her while she waited."_

_His dying father looked paler and more drawn the longer he spoke. He began to flag visibly with the effort, when he remembered, "A flat-chested, colorless reed of a girl. Though her hips looked adequate — for childbearing, at least. I said she was dreadfully plain," he admitted without hesitation. Or any acknowledgement of the black look Zuko gave him, his ire stoked by the unfair description. Mai was beautiful, and looked every inch a queen, whatever his father might think._

_His mouth quirked in what might have been a smile, when Ozai recalled, "Azula laughed and agreed — that with any luck — the children would inherit your looks — Mai's brains — and _her_ firebending."_

_But Zuko blinked, scowling. "That doesn't even make _sense_," he argued, crossing arms over his chest. "That's too many parents."_

_Ozai might have meant to shrug, but ended up cringing with the pain of his injuries. He had to suck in a pained breath before he could rasp, "Well, _I_ thought it was funny."_

_"Why didn't I ever hear about this?" Zuko demanded, at a loss what to make of these revelations, if they could be believed. He didn't see what Ozai had to gain by lying about any of it though._

_"I meant to announce it. When we had repelled the invasion," his father wheezed. "Reinforce the endurance. Of our family's rule. But with you an attainted traitor. Marked for death. There seemed no point. In bothering anymore with the girl._

_"I thought to have her put to the question," he casually admitted, and Zuko's heart skipped a beat, his arms dropped in surprise. "To discover your plans. Or lure you to capture." _

_Ozai frowned, his brows furrowed when he remembered, "But Azula insisted. Even under duress. That your Mai knew nothing. You cared nothing for her. You used and discarded her. We would be better served. To make her our ally. In seeking revenge. Rather than bait. Or unwilling informant."_

_And Zuko took a swift step back, shaking his head once as if to remind himself just who he was talking to. That his lie would have needed _Azula_ to sell it had never occurred to him, and he felt tears prick his eyes._

_"Eventually. She _convinced_ me," his father grit out, and Zuko felt a little sick wondering just how Azula had managed that. "Though I will never know now," Ozai brooded, as if unconscious of his audience. "If it was one more error in judgment. Or just another of her lies. There was a time. When she would not have _dared_ lie to me…_

_Ozai slid lower in his sickbed, settling back against the pillows with a pained exhalation that rumbled in his throat like a growl. "So I set _her_ the task. Of killing the traitor," he concluded almost dreamily, as if about to drift off into sleep. "Only that way could she restore my trust. In her judgment and abilities. But she failed me in that. Failed herself — and her country. And now," he whispered harshly, eyes fixed on his son. "Here we are."_

_Zuko met his tired gaze, looking but not seeing when he recalled the last impossible task Ozai had set one of his children. _You are banished from the Fire Nation, until such time as you find and capture the Avatar…

_Zuko had failed at his task too, even if he knew now Ozai had never meant for him to succeed, meant only to be rid of him. But Zuko had become a better person for his banishment and subsequent friendship with Aang, where Azula's task had destroyed her._

What else did he expect?_ Zuko thought sadly, squeezing his eyes briefly closed. _Sending her after family?

_"It wouldn't have to. Be _your _house. You know," his father struggled to get out. And Zuko glanced quickly at him, before he realized Ozai must have mistaken the look on his face. "I just don't want. To die in prison," he admitted, almost softly but for the wet rasp of his damaged lungs._

_"I _am_ dying," he gathered himself to argue, faded eyes searching his son. "And I am still. Your father." His ravaged face tensed with the effort of asking Zuko for anything, when he whispered roughly, "Whatever else. You might think of me. Don't you think. You owe me that much?"_

_"No," he whispered back, regret welling in Zuko like heartsblood. Even if it would never be regret for _him_. "_I don't_."_

Zuko lifted his heavy head now when the iron door opened opposite him, to admit one of the prison doctors treating his father. "The prisoner is ready to receive you, my Lord," the bespectacled doctor said, standing aside from the entrance to execute a polite bow with his hands held fist to palm.

Zuko nodded, and stood from his seat to face the ordeal. He did not ask himself if he was ready. The rest of his life entirely might not be long enough to answer that question.

And the rest of his life entirely was more time than Azula had.

* * *

Azula could only guess that a banyan grove tree was the botanical equivalent of the fabled lion turtle. It was certainly the largest living thing that she had ever seen, comparable in extent to her own home, the Imperial Palace. And in its own way, she supposed it was almost as impressive, if considerably less opulent.

Some hundred villagers gathered on the far side of the trunk, drawn from the cluster of huts where Azula had spent her recovery so far and from other settlements scattered throughout the swamp. They chose as their venue a place where the roots of the banyan grove tree and the slope of the surrounding rock and earth combined to form a natural amphitheater, a great hollow in the roots. Most of the tribesmen were already seated on steppes earthbent into the slope, whose hard edges had long since eroded away. A soft blanket of moss coated these and the rough path Azula descended with Anyu's arm for support, breathing hard from the walk there and silently cursing her lingering illness.

What kind of firebender couldn't even control her own breath? It was disgraceful to be brought so low, even by circumstances outside her control. _No_ circumstance should be outside her control…

When Annie went before her to give Azula a hand onto the rough dirt stage encircled by diverging roots, the buzz of conversation among the villagers died down, and Azula found herself the object of scrutiny and whispered speculation. She had to resist the sudden instinct to run, to fight, to burn her way free. Not because of their eyes on her, but for the fact of her enclosure. The feeling had only grown stronger the farther she descended, which wasn't far.

Though the sunlight that filtered down through the leaves still reached where she stood, though it was open to the humid air of the swamp, heavy with the scent of rotting vegetation, Azula could not ignore what this was. A hole in the ground. She may not be claustrophobic, but she shared any firebender's dislike for enclosed spaces. Even more so, considering the four years she spent locked in a padded cell, away from the sun…

_I'm never going back there_, Azula promised herself, a fierce scowl disturbing the mask of indifference she had put on for this ordeal. She may die here today or not, but she was never going back.

"Relax," the waterbender spoke almost harshly in her ear, no doubt feeling the tension coiled in her when Anyu slipped her own arm through Azula's again. She watched the princess with a new wariness. "No one here means ta harm ya."

So what, they would kill her by accident? Azula almost bit out, but thought better of her sarcasm. Earth smothered fire, and water was even worse. She was surrounded by enemies, if they should choose to be such. So Azula took a moment to study them, while she waited for someone to speak, and indicate their purpose.

Those villagers seated nearest the front were the warriors and benders of the tribe, some armed with short spears and some not, though all wore shin- and chestguards, and bracers hewn from wood. Anyu's son Tho was among them, and Azula thought she should have realized the significance, when he came to fetch her clad in the same ridiculous armor.

She had not laid eyes on that armor since they were captured on the Day of Black Sun, though the leaf hats were a common enough sight among the Swamp Tribe. The vine-bender Huu was one of the few men not similarly clad, but Azula supposed he had no need of a hat, when his own hair was cut like one. And no need of armor, when the abundant plant life would bend to his will.

"Yer Princess Azula?" someone finally shouted down from the steppes. Her sharp eyes picked out a teenage boy younger even than her, seated midway up the slope with his long brown hair bound in the same queue Azula had got so used to seeing in Ba Sing Se.

"Yer princess of the Fire Nation?" another man chimed in, for the youth shrank back when Azula's eyes fell on him.

She merely smirked. "I think you know I am."

Anyu gave her a warning look, and lightly grasped her wrist. Azula only returned a humorless smile to her, when she realized the healer had positioned her fingers over the princess's pulse point, probably in an attempt to gauge the truthfulness of her responses. Azula had learned more than enough of basic interrogation to know that obvious questions like these would establish her baseline.

Let the waterbender enjoy a false sense of confidence, she thought. Azula would find some way to turn it to her advantage yet. Tho's voice cut through a few low hisses and angry mutterings of the crowd, "Jest answer the question."

"My apologies," Azula spoke smoothly. "I wasn't told this would be a formal inquiry." She squared narrow shoulders and lifted her chin to reply, "Yes, I _am_ Princess Azula, daughter of Fire Lord Ozai and once-heir to the Burning Throne. I have other titles," she added, studying the clipped nails of her free right hand with practiced indifference, "but I've a feeling they'd be wasted on you."

"Why didja come here?" a round-faced woman stood from the ranks of wood-clad warriors to demand, and Azula squashed her irritation only with difficulty. Hadn't these people established any sort of hierarchy? How was she supposed to know who to appeal to or manipulate when it seemed everyone was afforded the right to question her?

"I was fleeing the pursuit of Earth Kingdom soldiers," Azula flatly replied, and raised a practiced eyebrow. "Do you make a habit of asking questions you already know the answer to?"

"She did'n mean —" the woman's companion hotly objected, before a tall, pale man with jowls and whiskers stood to yell over her, "And whatcha runnin' from _them_ for, eh? Whatcha done **wrong** that they's chasin' ya?" And the lanky tribesman sat back down as if very satisfied with himself.

"You would have to ask _them_," Azula spoke coldly into the sudden silence of a watchful audience. "I've been told I am convicted, though I do not know of what." A lie. King Bumi had apprised her quite thoroughly of the charges against her in Omashu. Azula glanced down briefly enough to school her face into the look of righteous indignation she had seen Zuko wear too many times to count. "I was not even present for my own trial."

A murmur of uncertainty rippled through the gathered tribesman, and Azula felt for the first time that she had them. "If you's runnin' such a risk ta be here, why leave yer country at all?" demanded the woman-warrior who had first questioned her, and still hadn't taken a seat. "Does you mean to conquer the Earth Kingdom agin?"

Azula shook her head once, though she felt more like barking out a laugh at the absurdity of it. Annie gripped her wrist tighter, when she calmly replied, "What purpose would that serve? The war has been over for four years, and my Lord father rots in prison —" Her voice fell flat on the last word, when her throat grew tight at the fresh realization of how long and how thoroughly she had failed him.

"My brother sits the throne now," Azula said slowly, letting resentment burn away the clinging remnants of her guilt, "and he would hardly thank me for the headache of governing your vast kingdom." He had his hands full enough with the colonies, if half the rumors she heard were true.

Uncertain silence met her reply, before she realized it would be left to her to break it. "Besides which, if I meant to conquer — and I don't — do you really think I would start _here?_" she indicated the swamp around them with her free right hand, and made no effort to disguise her contempt. They would expect it of her, and satisfying their expectations in this small way might assist her in selling them bigger lies later. "You could hardly be considered a seat of power."

But several of the assembled tribesmen actually smiled at her barb, and the stout Tho didn't bother standing to refute, "They's other kinds a power than what you folks in the Fire Nation fought for."

"This place has great mystical power," Anyu explained, leaning close to a wary Azula. "Our banyan tree's the biggest of its kind anywhere in the wide world. Its roots spread through the whole swamp, connectin' ever'thing."

"Afore the war, folks came from all four nations to meditate here and gain enlightenment," Huu spoke up from his place near where she stood, with what sounded like personal regret. Azula hadn't accounted him to be _that_ old, but she supposed such longevity wouldn't be the strangest thing to happen here. "Not many and not often," he admitted, big hands laid on his bare knees when he looked straight at Azula, almost _through_ her, "but they came, and they found what they was lookin' for."

_What they were looking for_…

Azula looked closer at him, and then to all the faces, young and old, light and dark, lined and bare and striped with war paint scattered on the gentle slope, who studied her back. The Foggy Swamp did not even appear on the maps she saw in the scrivener's shop, the secrecy which had kept the tribe neutral through much of the war persisting even in its absence. If the swamp itself wasn't widely known, then maybe —

She drew a deep breath, decided to risk it. "Is your banyan grove a gateway to the Spirit World?"

By the number of blank looks that met her question, Azula guessed that Huu was the only one here with an inkling of her intention, if she hadn't just imagined his hint. A number of confused glances were exchanged among the audience before one spear-wielding lump of a man rolled to his feet to offer, "If you wants to go ta the Spirit World, **I'd** be happy to send ya!" He thumped the shaft of his spear against his chestplate in a show of bravado. "_Perm'nantly!_"

Azula stared coldly at the warrior and the scattered laughs that graced his clumsy threat, but was surprised to see almost as many villagers look on him in disapproval. One skinny reed of a girl seated in the front row stood up to snap, "Si'down, Su! Whatever else she done, she's still our guest," she indicated Azula with a gesture of her hand. "T'ain't hospitable to make threats, and her in a delicate condition!"

And Azula froze momentarily, before the fire of indignation burned through the dread that settled like a lump of ice in her stomach. "You **told** them?" she demanded of Anyu in a harsh whisper, while some of the tribespeople reacted with mutters of surprise and others seemed to take the news in stride.

"I did'n have to," Annie calmly replied, her voice low and her veined hand still lightly gripping Azula's wrist, right arm locked with her left. "They can smell it on ya."

"_What_," Azula flatly demanded.

"The ointment," Anyu explained, and Azula was mildly surprised to realize she herself barely registered the smell of it anymore. "They know what it means, and they's smart enough ta put two and two tugether."

"I can't _believe_ this," she hissed under her breath, pinching the bridge of her nose with her free hand. Anyu looked about to reply, before Huu stood and looked around him at the numerous side conversations that had sprung up like brush fires with this fresh fuel for speculation.

"Why'd ya want to go to the Spirit World?" he asked mildly at last, and the other tribesmen fell silent to hear her reply.

Azula considered them for a long moment, weighing the risks and benefits. Her brother had the Avatar on his side, and if he learned of her plans, he might try to beat her there and keep her from her goal. He might try to trap her or otherwise make himself a nuisance.

On the other hand, Azula judged the chances of this swamp tribe telling Zuko in time for him to stop her as relatively low. Especially if she could enter the Spirit World here, now, without having to wait to reach the Avatar Shrine outside Omashu…

"I'm looking for my mother, Princess Ursa," she admitted grudgingly, at last. "I have reason to believe she may be trapped in the Spirit World."

"And what reason's that?" Annie's thickset son spoke doubtfully into the quiet that greeted her pronouncement, and Azula scowled.

"Does it matter? I have _reason_," she snapped, already resenting that they knew about her pregnancy and continued to pry. "I don't have to tell you everything about me."

"Ya don't have to," Annie patiently confirmed, speaking loud enough that the rest of the tribesmen seated around them could hear, "but ye'd be advised to consider't. The council might choose more faver'bly, if we knew what you intended."

Azula just glared at her, and her mood was not improved when Huu sat back down to admit, "And I'm 'fraid no one's ever crossed to the Spirit World from the banyan grove tree. It's too firmly rooted in the physical world."

"Great," Azula spoke flatly, with a sarcasm that reminded her painfully of Mai. "Just perfect. Are there any more pointless questions you'd like to ask me?"

Of course they would take her invitation literally. "Who's the father?" a tanned young man cupped hands to his mouth to yell down from the top of the slope, and Azula fixed him with her deadliest glare.

"Excuse me?"

"Who's yer baby's daddy?" an older, more grizzled waterbender crudely rephrased. Azula wondered what age men had to achieve before they should know better, but favored him with a poisonous smile all the same.

"Why, maybe one of _you_ fine gentlemen," she easily replied, and that shut them up quickly enough. "It was a _mistake_, that's all," Azula spoke harshly, before they could question her further. "I will deal with him in my own time."

She toyed very briefly with telling them the truth, tempted by the prospect of shattering their precious illusions about her precious brother. But Azula doubted it would accomplish anything, if they even believed her. And they were all too likely not to, when Zuko had already bought their favor by wasting the resources of the Fire Nation on their squalid backwater and pointless little lives.

_His soft heart saved you too_, spoke a tiny voice Azula did her best to ignore. _His soft heart saved both your lives_.

Ridiculous, she thought bitterly. If Zuko sent aid here, it was only to stoke his ego and prove what a "good" person he was. Just like he'd been doing since their mother used to praise and pet him for it. He never meant to save her, but —

_I don't care what you meant_, Azula had said once to Ty Lee._ I care what you did_.

So what if he saved her? Didn't he owe her that much? After all the chances she gave him, everything she gave only for him to reject her…

"Is you alright?" Anyu spoke quietly into her ear, and she realized the waterbender was watching her with undisguised concern. The heat that rushed to her face and neck when she flushed told Azula she must have gone pale, and she quickly snatched her hand back from where she laid it unconsciously over her stomach.

"They ast you a question," Anyu indicated the villagers seated around them when she saw Azula recover herself, and the princess raised her head.

"Our menfolk don't mean to be insensitive," said a broad woman who stood from her seat behind the warriors to toss a glance in chastisement at the male part of the audience. "They probably jest wondered _why_ you's havin' a baby."

Was she seriously expected to answer that? Azula wondered, and blinked once in disbelief. The expectant silence of the assembled tribesmen seemed to indicate she was.

"Well," she bit out impatiently, appropriate to such an obvious reply, "I should imagine because I had _sex_." The scandalized whispers that rippled through the crowd like wind through tall grasses might have amused her, if Azula weren't already angry at their presumption. "This may be a backwater, but I doubt even _you're_ that ignorant of the ways of the world."

Her questioner colored visibly at the barb, but a tall man sporting a full beard seated near her jumped up to hotly reply, "As you said, we ain't so _ignant_ of the ways of the world!" And he actually pointed down at Azula, as if intending to finger her for some crime. "We ain't so ignant we dunno it'd help yer **case** to have a _heir_ of yer own, if you meant to steal the throne from yer brother!"

"_What?_" Azula demanded shrilly, incensed. Anyu's warning look was turning quickly to one of outright alarm.

"Does you intend to **usurp** yer brother, the Fire Lord?" another tribesman yelled down the slope, oblivious to his danger. Azula dragged in two ragged breaths before she trusted herself to reply, her heart still thundering in the grip of too many emotions to number. _Careful_.

"_I don't know_," she grit out at last, her teeth clenched. A few of the swampbenders actually laughed, while others just shook their heads in disbelief or exchanged dubious whispers with their nearest neighbors. Azula could have burned them all to a crisp in that moment, if Anyu hadn't been clutching her arm.

"I have been imprisoned for four years, and only lately achieved my freedom," Azula spoke over them, when another breath proved sufficient to master herself. And with her usual flair for public speaking, she recaptured the less-than-polite attention of her audience.

"I don't know if I would rule," she spoke more quietly, forcing them to lean forward to hear her. "I only know I would not be ruled by _him_. Or any man." Many of the women present, Anyu included, gave Azula appraising looks at this, and she decided to capitalize on their willingness to listen. Her eyes fixed on the man who accused her.

"And how _dare you_ presume to know why I kept my baby?" she demanded, her words timed to fall like the sting of a lash. "What, am I not _allowed?_" Azula spat, her fingers tingling with the urge to spit fire. "To want what normal people want, to do what **normal** people do?" She gestured to the other tribesmen gathered on the slope as if in illustration. "Or do you really see me as so much of a fire-breathing _monster_ that you can't even **imagine** it?"

Her shaming worked. The man sat down, blushing and grumbling in equal parts, along with every other villager gathered around her. Azula felt almost lightheaded with her small victory. Even if fury still made her temples pound, like a headache that wouldn't go away.

"You know **nothing** of my motives or circumstances," she rebuked them all, "and have _no right_ to expect I should tell you. When you've treated me with — when — when you —"

"You should si'down," Anyu spoke urgently in her ear, steering Azula toward one of the moss-covered rocks that dotted the slope. "Ya been on yer feet too long."

"No," Azula whispered, suddenly unable to muster any more protest than this, "I don't want —" But she had just enough time to realize that her heart hadn't slowed its furious pace, her lightheadedness persisted, and it was getting harder to breathe — before her legs turned to jelly, and Annie had to catch her up and half-carry her to their seat, to a collective gasp from the tribesmen watching.

_That's right_, she thought scathingly, _give them a show. Show them how weak and pathetic, what little threat you are and they'll feel so sorry for you, they might let you go. It's not like you were leaving on your own power anyway_.

Her mouth twisted bitterly, and hot tears started to her eyes when she wondered, _What would Father say?_ To see what she was reduced to — what she _let herself_ be reduced to — when he had such plans for her…

Her eyes burned, her lungs burned, her heart hammered, her head pounded, and she was so thoroughly miserable, she didn't have it in her even to pull away when Anyu laid Azula's head on her round shoulder, and spoke soothingly, "Jest set still now, take deep breaths."

Azula did as advised, and her head began to clear. The main difference being that now it felt too heavy to lift. She was so tired. How much longer would she have to sit here and listen to this? The arguing continued behind her.

"Whatever else she done or plans to do, she's still kin to the Fire Lord! Her baby is his little niece or nephew! He done good fer us, with no expectation a bein' repaid —"

"And we's s'posed ta repay 'im by lettin' the likes a _her_ run free? By all 'counts, all they ever done is fight!"

"Maybe you ain't heard what he threatened ta anyone what kills her? Bad enough ta lose his frien'ship, we can't afford ta make 'im our enemy!"

"The Earth Kingdom never raised a finger to hep us, 'til he did. They would'n stir theyselves to hep us now, if he brought the mighta the Fire Nation down on us."

"And what about the mighta the Earth Kingdom? Ain't you heard how much they put in this search?"

"But they don' know she's here! Might be we could hide her, 'til we's ready to smuggle 'er out…"

Azula let their words wash over her, too tired to care much anymore by this point. Anyu told her she would start to regain some of her old energy, when she reached the second trimester. Azula had already noticed her morning sickness tapering off, as she neared the end of her first. She hadn't thrown up once since she woke from her illness, rather amazing when she recalled just _what_ they'd been feeding her.

She laid her left hand over the slight swell of her stomach, and didn't bother to remove it with no one but Annie to observe her. She could barely trace the beginnings of the bump through her clothes, and could only just see it when she was stark naked. But Azula doubted she could count on it to remain so inconspicuous. Built small as she was, she never expected she could hide a pregnancy for long. She never expected she would need to…

Her second trimester, she considered, and it began to look unlikely she would miscarry after all. That should bother her quite a bit more than it did. She wondered idly what Zuko would say, if he knew, though of course, he could never know. Maybe he would faint. Her lips twitched with amusement. That would be a sight.

It might even make her feel less like killing him.

It was eventually decided Azula would remain with the tribe and continue her recovery until the next new moon, about a week hence. Then they would smuggle her by canoe through the western wetlands that adjoined the swamp and opened on the sea, landing north of the camps set up around the swamp to flush her out.

It was suggested to her that she make for the colonies, there to rejoin her brother's protection, but Azula pointedly made no reply. She didn't even turn around. Let them think what they would of her plans. She was under no obligation to share them, now that she'd got what she needed.

It was explained this was meant as a gesture of friendship, a token of their gratitude for her brother's unselfish aid to the tribe.

Yet in that moment on the cusp of freedom, all Azula could hear was, _I'll always find you_.

* * *

Zuko didn't break his stride down the center aisle of the otherwise empty infirmary, careful not to betray any sign of reflexive concern upon seeing his father — _Ozai_ — laid out on the hospital bed like a man twice his age.

The angle of the bed had been adjusted to compensate for Ozai's increasing difficulty in sitting unassisted. His bandages had been removed, to reveal the ripples of scar tissue that crisscrossed his bare arms and torso in mottled, angry shades of red, pink, and even yellow. His doctor explained in the waiting room that they had just applied a salve, or the burns would not have to be exposed to air.

_Exposed to my sight_, he meant, and Zuko recalled how the doctor dropped his gaze a little too quickly at the questioning look his Lord gave him. Ozai lay on his back with eyes closed and thin hands clasped over his middle, looking like a corpse on a funeral pyre already, were it not for his intermittent shivering. It brought home just how much his father had lost, when Ozai was stripped of his bending…

_My scar looked worse, when they took the bandages off_, Zuko reminded himself forcefully, against the gorge that rose in his throat. It was no more than Ozai deserved. _He deserves to die for what he did_.

"_Where_ are Azula's medical records?" Zuko asked harshly, closing the distance to his father's bedside to cross arms over his chest. Ozai didn't even open his eyes.

"Well, don't beat around the bush, boy," he spoke weakly, visibly exhausted. "Say what it is. You want."

"_Her records_," Zuko insisted, in no mood for his sarcasm. Ozai sighed, fixed rheumy eyes on him reluctantly.

"And what in Agni's name. Would you want with those?" he spoke idly, as if he had no particular interest in the matter. His wan face stood out starkly against the dull black of his hair, snarled on the lumpy pillow.

Zuko hesitated, but knew he wouldn't get what he needed without some concession. "She's pregnant," he admitted hoarsely, glancing down.

Ozai watched him for a long moment, with no visible reaction. "Congratulations," he finally said, flatly.

"_What are_ — ?" Zuko demanded, disgust overwhelming his confusion. He took a swift step back, dropped his stance in shock. "Who **says** that?"

"I was trying to be _nice_," Ozai grit the word out as if it were a curse. His sunken eyes flashed with buried hatred, more alive than the rest of his face taken together.

"We both know how badly you react. To the _truth_." He gestured to the ripples of scar tissue that marred his chest in illustration. "And I doubt I have it in me. To survive another one. Of your outbursts."

And Zuko looked down again, his chest grown tighter at this quiet rebuke than any shout or blow Ozai might have rained on him in punishment once.

"So _what?_ What do you want me to say?" Ozai demanded, practically shivering with rage when he propped himself up on raw red elbows. "Nice job **ruining** her life? You prove surprisingly good at it? Though not _that_ surprising. When I consider. You ruin everyth_in_—"

His voice choked off in a violent fit of coughing. And cringing where he lay, Ozai snatched up an empty bedpan from the wheeled cart on the other side of the bed and spat bloody phlegm into it, with an abruptness that made Zuko flinch. But Ozai stayed turned away from him when he set the pan back down with a metallic _clang_, and didn't notice.

"Tell me what to say," Ozai wheezed in resignation, beginning to shake with the effort of supporting his weight on one elbow."And I'll _say_ it." He did not glare at Zuko but in the opposite direction, lank hair falling over his face and down his prominent shoulder blades. "Tell me what to say. And be **gone**."

Somehow, Zuko managed to speak past the lump in his throat. "Say where her records are."

Ozai collapsed onto his back with a pained exhalation, so suddenly Zuko started forward before he could halt himself. Again, his father didn't seem to notice. "In her bedroom. In the palace," he rasped, squeezing his shadowed eyes shut against a grimace of pain. "The secret compartment. In her desk. Behind the center drawer."

And Zuko stared. Just like that? No bargaining, no needling, no strings of any kind? Zuko considered that Ozai could be lying, but that would be shortsighted, even for him. He wasn't going anywhere, unless he thought to perish before Zuko uncovered his lie.

And it fit the pattern of his abuse, Zuko had to admit with a sinking heart. He already knew their father made Azula complicit in hiding it. _You'll never tell_…

"She kept. Her royal seal there," Ozai spoke weakly, his sharp brows furrowed. "Before she gave it. To that stupid chit."

_Ty Lee?_ he thought. And Zuko wondered again why his father kept talking, when it cost him such obvious effort. It seemed incredible that someone like Ozai could actually be lonely, but no other explanation occurred to Zuko.

"She thought. I didn't know," his father whispered. A faint smile touched his cracked lips, as if at a fond memory. "I let her think that. But I knew." He looked hard at Zuko, as if to say, _You had no secrets from me either_. "I _always_ knew."

Zuko bent his head in an unconscious gesture of respect, recovering himself enough to say stiffly, "Thank you, for —" And he stopped. _For not being yourself? For helping instead of _hurting_ a member of your family for once?_ Zuko could think of no kind way to put it, even if he wouldn't have guessed his last words to Ozai might be a mumbled, "Thanks."

He waited a moment for a reply that didn't seem forthcoming. Ozai might be asleep or dead for all Zuko could tell, so still he lay with eyes closed and bony hands set palms up, limply in his lap. Zuko moved to leave.

"When you read them …" Ozai spoke slowly behind him, but didn't finish his thought.

And Zuko stopped as if he felt the tug of some invisible bond. "What?" He turned to find Ozai watching him silently.

"Nothing," his dying father said at last, glanced away. "There's nothing. Left to say here. I think."

But Zuko's own face clouded with anger, and fingers clenched. He didn't just get to say something like that. He didn't get to act sorry _now_, after everything…

"Why'd you have to be like that?" Zuko said tightly at last, knowing this could be his last chance. His voice caught when he finally asked Ozai the same question Zuko had asked himself since the day he threw his father in prison. And even before that, when he realized after years wasted blaming himself that it was _Ozai_ who was wrong, who was weak, who had sacrificed everyone Zuko ever loved on the altar of his ambition…

"Our family could've been _happy_, if it wasn't for **you**."

But his dying father just snorted derisively. "Our family wouldn't **be**. If it wasn't for me," he pointed out, watching Zuko through heavy-lidded eyes. "_You_ wouldn't be. Azula wouldn't be.

"I gave you life," he reminded, his voice falling to a harsh rasp when his chin dropped to his burnt and blistered chest. "It may not. Have been. A life you _liked_. But I gave it. To you.

"Now you've done. Your part. In taking mine." He tried to gesture to himself, but couldn't seem to muster the strength even to lift his hand. Zuko for his part could only stare, horror and a creeping sense of guilt thudding through his veins with every beat of his heart. Even knowing what an unrepentant bastard his father was, he could honestly say this was not the reply he anticipated.

"What goes around. Comes around. I suppose," Ozai sighed, laying his head back against the pillow to look on Zuko with mild disdain. "I wonder if one day. You might have. This conversation. With _your_ son."

"I'll **never** be like you," Zuko whispered harshly, his uninjured eye glaring as fiercely as the scarred one. But Ozai just smiled coldly.

When he left the ward, Zuko found a woman guard waiting in the hall outside, beside the doctor who admitted him. She smoothed the skirt of her uniform, and the bored expression from the tanned oval of her face, when he walked through the double doors. And she bowed from the waist with her hands held fist to palm alongside the prison physician.

Zuko nodded curtly to the young doctor, and stepped aside to let him re-enter the sickroom and tend to his father. "Yes?" he spoke tersely to the woman, who stood straight to address him.

"The warden wished to speak to you, my Lord." She dropped her gaze in deference. "If you're willing."

Zuko bit back a sigh, and only replied, "Of course."

The warden's windowless office was small and spare as the warden himself. As Zuko had been here before, he paid little heed to the meager furnishings, his attention focused on the grizzled man seated behind the desk instead. He was of a height with Iroh, if a good decade younger, his squarish face framed by graying muttonchops, such as many old military men favored.

He stood and bowed reflexively when Zuko entered, but resumed his seat at a shake of the head, and the hand Zuko raised to deter him. It had taken long enough to break guards and servants of the habit of kowtowing every time he walked into a room, at times like these, Zuko found himself growing impatient with even these abbreviated formalities.

"You wanted to see to me?" Zuko opened the conversation, knowing by now that it was his prerogative as Fire Lord to speak first — and last. He took a seat in one of two chairs hewn of the same weathered wood as the desk they sat before.

"Yes, Fire Lord Zuko," he said seriously, his seamed face set in a perpetual frown. "I want to talk about —"

"My father," Zuko interrupted him flatly, and the warden nodded.

"Ye've seen his decline for yourself," the warden continued, hands clasped before him on the cluttered desk. "I ask Your Majesty to reconsider releasing him to house arrest."

"Why?" Zuko demanded, more harshly than he intended.

The warden looked pained. "Sire, it's not only for his sake I ast, but yours. No one can doubt he treated you cruel," the warden admitted, glancing at his scar and away again, so that Zuko touched it self-consciously, "or that ye were the only one. If he ruled as responsible, and showed the care for his people you have, no one'd have stood for him being imprisoned.

"But four years is a long time, and people forget." _Lucky them_, Zuko thought bitterly. "They hear tell of his burns and his sickness, and see only a dying father neglected by his son, or worse," he risked raising a callused hand just slightly, to forestall Zuko's interruption, "the Lord who ruled their nation when it were proud and strong," — _off the spoils of war_ — "left to die in a cage like a common criminal."

"There was nothing **common** about his crimes," Zuko said coldly, gripping the edge of his seat to keep his hands from shaking. "And I would ask just where these people _heard tell_ of his condition?"

The warden looked mildly disapproving, reminding Zuko with a pang of his uncle, still searching the Earth Kingdom for Azula. "My Lord, I'm only repeating what my guards've told me. They signed confidentiality agreements when your father came here, I'm well aware," he sighed, loosing his clasped hands as if in apology. "But enough of them saw what happened, and treated and guarded him after, that it'd be impossible to find out just who told what to who at this point. Not to mention counterproductive. The less people ye have asking questions about this, the better."

Zuko glanced sharply at him, but could make out no hint of a threat. The warden looked stern and upright as only a grizzled old war veteran could do, but Azula taught him a long time ago not to trust appearances. "I know you don't leave the prison often," Zuko finally replied, careful to moderate his tone. "So you may not know there's been a lot of talk about me in the last few months, most of it bad. Yet I'm still here," he gestured to himself in illustration. "I still rule. Thank you for sharing your concerns, Warden Nobu. But I can't agree. If that's all?"

He rose to leave, but stopped in surprise when the warden said simply, "No." His questioning glance made Nobu color when he realized his slip, but the warden persisted. "No, sire. That's _not_ all. Forgive me for speaking so frankly, but…"

The warden drew a deep breath as if to marshal his argument, and squared his spiked shoulders when Zuko grudgingly took a seat again. "If Your Majesty won't think of your reputation, please think of the reputation of your people and our justice system." And Zuko blinked once in surprise. This was new.

"The Fire Nation is _humane_ to its prisoners," he stressed. "This was a point of distinction between us and the other nations. A standard we held ourselves to even at the height of the war." His meaty hands clenched on the desktop. "To abandon it now, in peacetime, for no less a person than the former Lord of our nation — Sire, please," he looked hard at Zuko. "It's unconscionable."

Zuko could only stare for a moment, sickened. This couldn't be happening. If Ozai had got the warden on his side, how many of the guards would think he deserved to be released too? And how much longer could Zuko deny them before they took action?

But neither could he give in and release Ozai to house arrest. To make concession to a heartless monster who deserved none was _truly_ unconscionable, and — "It's too much of a security risk," Zuko argued, feeling by now that he was stalling for time, hating the alternative just as much. "Nowhere I put him would be as defensible as this prison."

But the warden just frowned, recognizing the hollowness of his reply. "Sire, whatever your personal grievances —"

"They're not just mine," Zuko said quickly, coming to a decision. There was no other way; he _had_ to convince him. Zuko glanced down and heaved a quiet sigh, before looking to the older man who gave him full attention.

"Warden Nobu," he warned quietly, his gaze harsh and unblinking, "what I'm about to tell you can never leave this room." The warden seemed taken aback, but managed to nod mutely. It wasn't enough though. Zuko needed his word. "If you repeat this to anyone," he said slowly, pausing to let it sink in, "you'll lose more than just your job. Do you understand?"

"Yes, my Lord," Nobu replied after an appropriately timed pause. "I promise."

Zuko nodded with lips pursed, trying to think of how in Agni's name to relate this to a virtual stranger. "You remember my sister?" he asked at last, and didn't imagine how the warden tensed at this.

"The princess Azula?" Nobu warily replied. "Of — of course, Your Majesty."

His head and shoulders bent, and Zuko gripped his knees at the admission, "The night I burned — _Ozai_, I found out that —" He pressed his lips tightly together as if to hold the words back, and had to draw a deep breath before he could admit to the cluttered expanse of desk between them, "He raped her."

"_What?_ My gods!" the warden gasped, and Zuko looked up to see he had pushed his chair back from the desk, his brown eyes round with shock. But one look at Zuko's face was sufficient to convince him, it seemed. "His own _daughter?_" Nobu said helplessly, and Zuko nodded.

"The three years I was banished with my uncle, he abused her with no one to stop him," Zuko grimly explained, the words coming easier now that he could see his own outrage and disgust mirrored on the warden's face. It was a surprising comfort, reluctant as Zuko had been to tell anyone for her sake. "When I heard how he talked about it — about _her_ —" He shook his head slowly, his teeth clenched when he remembered, "I just couldn't take it.

"For what he's done, there can be **no** forgiveness. And no mercy."

"I grieve for you, my Lord. And the princess," the warden spoke gruffly at last, recovering himself, and Zuko saw the lines on his weathered face soften with a new compassion. "This is heavy news to bear."

"Th-thank you," Zuko managed, tears starting to his eye at the realization, so obvious in hindsight, that other people might offer comfort instead of judgment, sympathy instead of doubt at this awful revelation. "It's — kind of you to say so."

The warden obligingly glanced away, hands clasped on the desk in front of him, while Zuko blinked the tears from his eye. Then he continued, "I won't pretend what you did was _right_." Zuko looked quickly at him, but the warden was undeterred, seemingly emboldened by his confidence. "But it was, I think, understandable," he admitted, as if pained. "It weren't on your own behalf you acted.

"And I can't deny the other prisoners would've done worse, if Your Majesty put him in general population here, or at the Boiling Rock. That sort have their own form of honor," the warden grimly explained, at Zuko's blank look. "They do for child killers and child rapers theyselves, when the courts can't or don't.

"And I agree with Your Majesty on the need for — discretion," Nobu continued, locking his thumbs together, "if the princess is ever to live a normal life." And Zuko let out a long breath, wondering privately if that was even possible at this point. "But the circumstances I outlined still apply," the warden reminded him.

"I know I'll never convince Your Majesty to go with house arrest," he said quickly, to forestall an argument. "Not sure I have the heart to try now, to be honest." The warden grimaced in distaste. "But so long as he's alive, your father _will_ be a problem."

Zuko felt suddenly sick. "Do you mean —"

"Of _course_ not," the warden was offended enough to interrupt him, scowling. "I have my honor same's you, sire. And I'm duty-bound to guard the persons **and** the lives of every prisoner in my custody. I've done what I can by warning Your Majesty. It's for you to take what measures ye can to protect yourself."

"Then thank you for — your counsel," Zuko awkwardly replied, standing from his seat to conclude the interview. _More honest counsel than I get from most of my advisors_, he thought scathingly, and added, "And for being so forthright."

The warden stood with him, but instead of bowing, interjected, "Sire, if I could give you one piece of advice?" Zuko nodded permission, and Nobu spoke hesitantly, "Ye might want to think more carefully about who you have 'tending him. The prisoner has made," he paused tellingly, "disgusting insinuations against Your Majesty."

Zuko could practically feel the blood drain from his face, and began to wish he'd stayed seated. "I put no stock by them," the warden added hastily, seeing his expression, "dismissed them as — delusions of a diseased and dying mind. But knowing what I know now," he grimly opined, "I think he means to cast suspicion on Your Majesty for his own crimes."

"Thank you for telling me this," Zuko said hoarsely, barely managing to keep his voice steady. "I'll take your words to heart."

The warden nodded, and stepping out from behind the desk, went down on his knees to prostrate himself before a Fire Lord who'd grown thoroughly unused to it. "It's my honor to serve you, Fire Lord Zuko," he spoke to the stone floor, and Zuko could only stare down at the back of his graying head for a long moment, before he managed his reply.

"The honor is mine."

* * *

Anyu climbed the massive root of the banyan grove tree, to find Azula seated lotus-style at arm's length beside Huu, meditating on the eve of her departure from the swamp. Azula could feel Annie standing there even with her eyes closed, the benefit not just of her careful training in combat, but also the heightened awareness of life force that the mystic had helped her cultivate over the last few days in their shared meditation.

The less time she had to spend sleeping, the more bored out of her skull Azula became, until she had finally taken the vinebender up on his offer. It wasn't like there were any books here to occupy her time, and her caretaker's caution allowed Azula only so much exercise in a day, even as her physical condition improved.

And Anyu, on behalf of the whole tribe, Azula suspected, had warned her in no uncertain terms that while she was allowed to practice her katas, she could not bend fire while she still dwelt in the swamp. Azula had taken this as a challenge at first, not that it would ever prove difficult for a bender of her skill to stem the flow of fire when she needed. But the familiar stances and movements made her miss her bending so much that she consented without complaint to show off her blue flames to some curious children of the tribe, when they asked.

Azula felt a prickle of irritation even now, like an itch she couldn't scratch, when she remembered how Annie watched her indulge the snot-nosed little urchins with a knowing smile. As if to say, _See? You're a natural at this._ Like she knew anything about it, with her big, dumb husband and seven lumpish sons and excessive hugging…

"It's time to head out," Anyu spoke at last, as if reluctant to interrupt her meditation.

Azula opened her eyes to the distressing sight of Huu clambering to his feet beside her — no amount of time spent in his company would make her stop wishing he would _wear more clothes_ — and looked away, out over the swamp. Meditating so high up in the root system near the colossal trunk of the banyan grove tree afforded a sweeping view of the valley and the swamp that blanketed it. Azula could see the sun had just dipped below the horizon off to the west, behind a cleft in the mountains where the wetlands and passage to the ocean lay.

She glanced at Anyu in question, ignoring the hand up her caretaker offered to climb to her feet. Azula was silently grateful she hadn't yet put on enough weight that she had to compensate for a shift in her center of gravity. If Annie was perturbed by the slight, she gave no sign, but only explained, "It'll be full dark by the time we reach the edge-a the swamp. The route there's not direct, an' we might have to carry the canoes a ways."

Azula raised an eyebrow at her use of the term "we". She raised it higher when Anyu reached behind herself to detach a familiar article from her belt, and hold the panel open to expose the wick. "Wouldja mind doin' the honors?" she asked cheerfully, and Azula smirked at the healer's audacity.

"If I didn't know better," she spoke casually, lighting it with a flicker of flame from two fingers, "I'd say this was my oil lamp."

Anyu smiled sheepishly, but didn't bother to deny it. "Ya could consider it payment fer weeksa expert care," she asked more than stated, shrugging for good measure.

"And here I thought my brother was picking up the tab," Azula flatly observed, frowning at the thought of him as she followed the two old waterbenders down the snaking path of the banyan tree root.

Annie mistook her expression, and hesitated at this. "If ya need —"

"Of course not," Azula cut across her, waving her away in annoyance. "Keep it for yourself. It's fine."

"Thank you, Princess," she politely replied, but Azula just sniffed with practiced disdain.

"Don't bother," she dismissed, picking her way carefully down a particularly gnarled part of the root. "If I had any use for it at all, I certainly wouldn't have given it to you."

"_Mmhm_," Anyu hummed doubtfully behind her, and Azula didn't look at her for the rest of the trip back to the village on its little island of sodden ground.

The standing torches were already lit when they returned, as night fell early beneath the canopy of the trees. While Huu left to join the small party of waterbenders who would smuggle her out, Anyu gestured for Azula to follow her back to the hut where she had slept and healed for the last few weeks. The healer set the oil lamp on the counter of the careworn bureau that held her medical supplies, where its light illuminated the small interior of the clinic.

And Azula found another familiar article lying on the bed, waiting for her. "My pack?" she wondering, walking over to it. But it had been expertly mended, both straps intact again and its contents neatly packed. Azula didn't bother asking, _You found it?_ for clearly they had, but couldn't help exclaiming over the freshly cleaned clothes she had gained in Gaoling, and now found folded inside.

"How did you — I thought these were ruined?" She looked to Annie in question, but the waterbender just waved a dismissive hand.

"They jest had some mud in 'em. Nothin' I couldn' handle. Which reminds me…" she trailed off annoyingly, and turned to extract from one of the bureau's many cubbyholes a token printed on thick, inflexible paper, edged with gold and topped with a green ribbon. The first class passport Poppy Beifong had given her.

"Ma bendin' works as well on paper as clothin'," Annie informed her a little smugly, amused by the impressed look Azula clearly had not erased from her face quickly enough. "Though I'm 'fraid yer food was a total loss. I packed ya a few things that oughta keep though."

She held out the passport to Azula, but didn't immediately relinquish her grip when the princess moved to take it. "Even I know a document like this 'un's purdy rare," Anyu warned seriously, frowning when Azula plucked it from her grip. "You wanna think twice 'bout usin' it, or ya might 'tract some attention of the wrong sort."

"I _know_," Azula spoke irritably, shoving the passport into her pack and wondering if Annie's homespun advice was the price she had to pay to get her supplies back. It seemed she wasn't far off the mark, when the healer continued, "An' I know ya don' intend to go back to yer brother."

Azula stilled in checking her pack, and slowly lifted her head, daring the waterbender to say more. But Annie didn't take the hint. "I won' pertend to know what come between ya," she spoke reluctantly, clasping her veined hands in front of her. "But you have more'n jest yer own safety to think of now, and I hope wherever yer goin', you'll be careful."

"I'm always careful," Azula dismissed, but Anyu directed a pointed gaze at her midsection, where her thickening waist and the hint of a bump had forced Azula to belt the long vest she wore higher than usual.

When the waterbender looked her in the face again, Azula felt the heat rush to it, and turned away under pretext of donning her pack. "I _told_ you," she grit out. "It was a mistake."

Anyu's voice was gentle _careful_ when she replied, "Sometimes, what we think of as mistakes is jest blessin's in disguise —"

"_Spare_ me," Azula snapped, walking for the door. "You're not my **mother**."

"No," Annie acknowledged a little sadly, "but I wonder if ya'd listen any better ta her."

Azula stopped on the threshold, her narrow shoulders gone rigid with anger. "So **that's** it, isn't it?" she turned on the healer to accuse rather wildly, her eyes smarting with unwelcome _treacherous_ tears. "You think if I just listened to _her_, I wouldn't be in this mess?"

She laid her hands unconsciously over her middle, but Anyu shook her head. "I never said that."

"You were _going to_," Azula dismissed scornfully, but Annie was unimpressed.

"If you keep knowin' what people's gonna say afore they say it, you'll never be surprised," she warned cheekily. "Fer good or bad. And wouldn' tha be a shame?"

"Enough," Azula finally sighed, leaning against the archway and crossing one arm beneath her breasts, to press the other hand against her bowed head, and the pain building behind her eyes at this tedious conversation. "Why are you doing this?"

Seeing the old healer's confusion, Azula explained impatiently, "Your tribe doesn't want to kill me because they think Zuko will — _rain fire _on them or something." Any other time she would have laughed at the idea, it was so ludicrous, but now she just bit out, "**Fine**. But why — track down my supplies, mend my pack," she gestured to it, "fix my clothes and my passport, and give me stupid life advice? Sparing my life didn't require any of that, so _why?_"

Anyu looked nonplussed for the first time in their conversation. "B'cause," she spoke uncertainly, as if she had not thought she would be called upon to explain this. "I guess yer — not as bad as I heard tell, and well —" The old waterbender looked, gratifyingly, almost as uncomfortable as Azula felt when she admitted, "I hope ya end up alright."

Nothing in her experience told her what to say to that, so Azula just glanced away, lips stretched tight against anything she might say anyway. She blinked away tears as Anyu approached and made to lay a hand on her shoulder, but stepped back in time to deny her.

"_Don't_," Azula managed, drawing a deep breath. "I don't — like to be touched."

Well, she could stand hugs from Ty Lee, but only because she'd been conditioned to over several years. People didn't understand. These things took time. If Ty Lee was here now though, Azula would probably even hug her back. She wished Ty Lee was here.

"I almost forgot," Annie said kindly as if a sudden thought had struck her. The healer turned back to the bureau to retrieve a bottle whose body and cap were formed of the same dull white, ivory-like material, and held this out to her.

But when Azula took it from her tanned hands, she found the material surprisingly flexible and lightweight. _Celluloid_. "You got this from the Fire Nation," Azula flatly remarked, and Anyu nodded.

"It's prenatal vitamins," she explained unnecessarily, while Azula studied the clearly labeled bottle with instructions printed in minute script down the side. "Ya should take one ever'day."

Azula grimaced at the thought of another handout from Zuko, but exhaled a sigh and pocketed it all the same. She supposed it was the least he could do, considering he put a bastard in her belly in the first place…

"Yer brother did us a kindness, sendin' these medicines," Anyu reinforced the point, oblivious as usual to the irony, "and I didn' mind doin' you a kindness in turn. 'Cause I know one day soon…" The healer glanced rather obviously at the curve of her belly, and Azula thought, _This again?_ "You'll do a kindness."

"And do you have any way of enforcing that?" Azula asked evenly, having achieved the proper emotional distance to doubt the world and everyone in it again. Anyu blinked in the midst of taking another bottle from the shelf, and Azula tilted her head to smirk at the matronly waterbender. "For all you know, I'll dump the brat on the doorstep of the first orphanage I find, and be done with it." If the mistakes she made that night, and in asylum, didn't kill it first…

But Anyu must have seen something in Azula's face that made her doubt, for the healer smiled when she admitted, "Maybe. But I have a inklin' —" She tossed another bottle of prenatal vitamins to Azula, her dark eyes glinting when the princess caught it handily. "You won't."

* * *

It took several days and the impending arrival of her doctors the next morning for Zuko to work up the courage to actually read Azula's medical records. He had located them with little trouble, exactly where Ozai directed him, and left the hefty scroll to sit neglected on the desk in the Fire Lord's chambers, where Zuko had begun sleeping again since the bed and elaborate canopy were reconstructed.

The irony did not escape him that this was exactly how he acted with the first letter Azula sent from the asylum, but Zuko failed to see the humor in it. If anything, he had even more to fear from the contents of this scroll.

He had noted on first inspection just how many distinct hands were in evidence; Zuko should have guessed the office of royal physician would have a rapid turnover, under a Fire Lord as violent as Ozai. There should have been nothing to surprise him within, when he sat tailor style in his pajamas at the foot of the bed to review her medical history. Zuko thought he was beyond the point of being surprised.

He wasn't.

It was all here. Everything their father had ever done to Azula. _Everything_. From otherwise inexplicable cuts and bruises, sprains and burns, even bones broken in "training" when everyone knew her forms were perfect, had always _been_ perfect… To injuries that no person even passably familiar with firebending would ever attribute to training.

How she almost died at thirteen from a botched abortion. It took every ounce of willpower Zuko had not to burn the scroll to ashes when he read that. And then finish what he started with Ozai.

It would have been appallingly obvious she was being abused. And no one did a damn thing about it.

Not her guards or servants, her royal tutors or the elderly twins who instructed her in firebending. Not her classmates or teachers at the Royal Fire Academy for Girls, which she attended until her graduation at age twelve. Not the nobles and military officials who came to pay court to her father. Not the gloomy nobleman's daughter who was shipped off to the Earth Kingdom with her entire family, or the aspiring acrobat who ran away to join the circus.

Not her mother, who was still here when Azula broke her wrist in the first week Father trained her. Who should have seen the marks when she dressed Azula for bed, the blood in her daughter's hair when she brushed it out. If she had even done those things for Azula. It had been so long, Zuko found he couldn't say for sure…

_She only had time for her favorite, before she abandoned us both_.

Not her brother, who saw things he didn't understand. Not because he was too young or lacked experience. Zuko knew where the marks came from, the pain that made you favor a half-healed injury.

But because he lacked perspective. Because Azula was Father's favorite, his **favorite**, his perfect girl, and why couldn't Zuko be more like her? Her perfection was a simple fact of life, a standard he'd been held to for almost as long as he could remember. How could she be perfect and still need the hard lessons Father doled out to Zuko? It must be like their father said, that Zuko was just being weak and stupid and worthless again. That he was wrong about what he saw, what it meant…

Zuko could not remember ever consciously thinking that, of course, but how else had he reconciled it? It would have been appallingly obvious she was being abused — to everyone except the brother only two years older than Azula, abused almost as badly as her and trained just like her to blame everyone _but_ their abuser. It had been so long and the events of his early life blurred together so inextricably, that Zuko couldn't have said if he saw it once or half a hundred times. Maybe he'd done too good a job of forgetting.

He could not remember now if he ever asked Azula what was wrong, how did it happen? Was she okay? Did she want to talk about it? Oh gods, he hoped he had. He hoped he'd done that much, even if he knew himself and his sister well enough to know how easily she would deflect his concern. A few well-placed insults to draw his attention back to his own fears and shortcomings, and he would forget that he ever felt anything for her but — but hatred.

Zuko felt that hatred now not for her, but for every person who saw, and did nothing. In that moment, sitting hunched over on the bed with the damning scroll fallen from empty hands, Zuko hated with such intensity that he could barely breathe. He wondered if this was how it felt for Azula all the time, and if it was, how she lasted so long before she finally broke —

He wrapped bare arms around his middle to still the shaking of his hands, drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He left the tears that streaked the right side of his face for now, not yet ready to let go and swipe them away. Her doctors would have known, he was forced to acknowledge. They probably even said something, tried to do something…

That would certainly explain why he hadn't been able to track down even one of the physicians who served the royal family in the three years he was banished. There had been several, all eventually reassigned or granted commissions or endowments elsewhere. After which they suffered accidents, or simply disappeared.

But this sorry history might yet do some good, if the doctors he sent for could use it, could find some way to help Azula out of this mess he landed her in. It was his ignorance and her conditioning to blame in the first place, but maybe, with knowledge —

And he stopped, abruptly recalling Mai's argument, _But how do you know? You're a _fool_ if you think it ever happened_…

Mai would have to believe him now. She would **have** to admit it happened, when he had a written record of his father's abuse. Maybe with belief would come understanding, with understanding would come forgiveness —

Zuko was so impatient he didn't take the time to roll the scroll back up, just gathered the folds in his arms before he burst out into the lamplit hall, startling the two imperial firebenders who stood on either side of his door. And scattering any servants he encountered in his haste with the black looks he gave them and the harsh words he spoke. He had not forgotten his anger; it was still there, held at bay only by the fragile hope that drove him to Mai's bedroom door despite her warning never to come unless she sent for him.

So when she opened the embossed door almost immediately after he started knocking, the hint of surprise that registered on her usually impassive face was only a pale reflection of Zuko's own. "You got my message?" she greeted him, in a tone that implied, _That was fast_. She glanced to the guards on either side of her own door, but they ignored the royal interactions as assiduously as ever they were trained.

Zuko just shook his head as if to throw off a buzzing insect, entering the immaculate antechamber without invitation to let Mai close the door behind him. "I found them," he said quickly, turning to indicate the scroll bunched in his arms. "Azula's medical records."

Mai scowled and crossed her arms, the trailing sleeves of her bedrobe hanging loosely as the waistlength hair that spilled down her back. "You found them a week ago, how is this news?"

"I just read them tonight, and Mai —" He stepped forward, offering her the loops of paper gathered haphazardly against his chest. "It's all there, everything I told you and — and more. When you read them —"

"I won't."

"What?" Zuko said blankly, almost dropping the scroll in shock. "But it's **proof** of what I've been saying all along!" he argued hotly, his ire stoked when she let down her arms with an impatient sigh to step past him into the room. "You owe it to _yourself_ as much as Azula to find out —"

"I _don't_," Mai cut across him, walking swiftly for the elegantly carved desk set opposite the door, pushed up against the back of a clawfooted sofa.

"But you have to **admit** it happened!" Zuko objected, noting how her angular shoulders tensed when he followed close behind Mai. "You _have_ to read the —"

"_I said no!_" She rounded on him with an open black-ribbon scroll clutched in shaking hands — Mai whose hands were so steady — and such white-faced fury that Zuko couldn't summon a word in reply. "_What_, you didn't learn that lesson with **Azula?**" she practically spat, her eyes glaring daggers.

"_Mai_…" he gasped, so wounded by her implication that the bunched medical records fell from his hands, unremarked. Mai stepped on them with feet bare as the contempt on her narrow face, when she shoved the black-ribbon scroll off on Zuko with a hand to the chest.

"You perfect fool," she whispered harshly, her low voice breaking. "We're at war."

* * *

**Ugh. Long chapter is LONG. (Product of dialogue in every scene; you wouldn't believe how it inflates word count...) And this took a long time. Be glad I'm on vacation, or it would've taken even longer. Also (brace yourself) this author's note will be long. Hence why it's at the end of the chapter, despite that I had to end on another cliffhanger. I think something's wrong with me, I just can't stop with those.**

**So many reviews last chapter, for which I'm so thankful! Let me to try to answer what questions/comments I can: Very glad you guys liked the Foggy Swamp folk, even if their dialogue gives my inner grammar-freak palpitations. I do have the distinct benefit of living in a region where I've had first-hand experience of a similar accent, though it's not as common or pronounced as is often portrayed in media. (Incidentally, I don't have it — or really any accent — because I moved around so much growing up.)**

**Mai isn't so much corrupted by power or desperate to hold onto her own power, as she is concerned that her son's birthright will be taken from him (and with that, probably also his life). Mai despises politics and has little patience for court intrigues, even if she was raised to be good at that sort of thing. Unfortunately(?) having fallen in love with and subsequently married a monarch, it's not something she can safely avoid. (Also, Lu Ten is Zuko's biological son. His looks favor his mother, but he has Zuko's smile and his eyes are the same color, just a shade lighter. Any problem conceiving was on Mai's account, and she would have had that problem regardless of who she tried with. Zuko, on the other hand…)**

**justa08: First off, congratulations! Babies are wonderful, I should know: I have six little nieces and nephews that I can ship back to their parents after I spoil them rotten or do something stupid, like give them caffeine. I loved your suggestions for pregnancy foibles for Azula, and had actually considered incorporating the frequent urge to pee into her "shopping" trip in Gaoling, but ended up having to cut it when the plot took another direction and due to space constraints. (You just know Azula would probably schedule her bathroom breaks like Sokka with his Master Schedule, and she'd be all pissed that she's having to stop all the time.)**

**I also doubt she would view incest (with her brother or her father) as anything inherently wrong. Azula's morality is less in terms of "wrong and right" than in terms of "cost and benefit". (i.e. Her morality is more "selfish" or internally determined, than "social" or externally determined.) Ozai's training had the measurable benefit (as he put it) of making her skilled at sex and at controlling herself and the act to the extent that she could use it to manipulate men. Also, she "consented" to it, though that consent was obviously (at least it's obvious to us) void considering her young age and the squicky power dynamics of him being her father.**

**Sex with Zuko was less than consensual, and came at the cost (as he noted) of any trust she had remaining toward her brother, and of losing to Zuko and being burdened with reminders of that defeat (emotional and physical injuries, the baby) afterward. From this perspective, Azula views sex with Zuko much more negatively than she views "training" with her father. Whereas the latter was obviously (to us) much more damaging to her emotional and even physical health in ways that Azula can't truly describe or even grasp yet, because she never had the benefit of a healthy, loving childhood, or even seeing what that looked like.**

**As for your second question … Where to start? Zuko obviously feels A LOT toward Azula, much of it contradictory. I would agree with pretty much everything you wrote leading up to that question, and will address it further via PM (tomorrow) once this chapter is posted, 'cause I'm already running long and want to get the chapter posted. Thank you so much for your glowing praise though, it was very kind!**

**And missingthepoint completely got the point about June's relationship to her father being a foil for Ozai's relationship toward his children, and this will actually touch further plot developments as the story progresses. And oh my gosh, could you imagine that family therapy session? There is not enough therapy (or enough therapists) in the world… But hey, when it gives me giggles like "THAT COOKIE BAKING IN HER OVEN!" it's all worth it, right? Condolences on the jump drive though; technology sucks when it stops being wonderful. Or gets lost or stolen. Or fried by lightning. (This literally happened to my harddrive three years ago. I wish Azula did it, then it would have been at least mildly cool.)**

**Celebel: The unusual dynamic they have ("that Ozai preferred a daughter to a son … because from his PoV she was just plainly so much better at things that matter") is still fully present and in effect for Dominion. Ozai didn't choose her BECAUSE he wanted to sexually exploit her; he sexually exploited her because he chose her. Ozai trained her that way because he wanted to see her turn a "weakness" into a weapon, a weapon that would then be at his disposal when he sent her to seduce enemies or allies as his needs demanded. (She wasn't quite old enough for him to attempt that before he was defeated and imprisoned, but that was the eventual plan.) And it's probably worth noting (though admittedly a dubious distinction) that Ozai did not embark on this course with the INTENT of sexually exploiting her (e.g. for his own pleasure), though that was the inevitable effect, since he did to her things no parent should ever do to a child (or really anyone should ever do to a child).**

**The bedroom scene in The Awakening was given particular attention last chapter because Azula's bedroom was where the reveal of her pregnancy (to Zuko) took place. But I would argue that a lot more interactions than just this one in cartoon!canon give off a distinctly unsiblinglike vibe for Zuko and Azula. (Which just makes the rare occasions they act like actual siblings even more poignant.) I'd agree she was probably trying to make him squirm (I don't think she actually intended to seduce him there, maybe distract him), but that she chose to do it that way is … telling, I think. **

**I'm also reminded of the way she would twirl around columns and circle him as a little girl (you just wonder where the hell she picked that up) and how she uses body language like proximity and touch to manipulate Zuko… This is just some of the evidence (to me) that she lacks boundaries necessary to the healthy functioning of relationships, probably because Ozai was continually violating hers, not just physically, but emotionally. He never really treated her as his daughter, but as whatever suited his needs at the moment. She had to learn to be whatever he needed, whatever he wanted in order to survive, which has had a profound impact on her identity into the present day… But I'm rambling again, so let me just say I really enjoyed your review, and I hope you'll find answers to some of your questions soon :)**

**Thanks again to my awesome reviewers, regulars and late arrivals. I've loved hearing from you, and I always will. And special thanks to Meneldur, who took time out of a very busy schedule to beta the first half of the chapter for me last month. (You're the best!)**

**Oh my gosh, is this author's note finally over? It is! (Can you tell it's very late here? It is!) I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and that you'll LEAVE A REVIEW. **

**(That little box. Right down there. So close you can smell it. So close you can TASTE it. Don't smell it. Don't taste it. Just click there. Type characters. Preferably forming actual words. About my story. That would be best.)**

**Please leave a review? I'll look away now, so you don't feel self-conscious ;)**

***whistles nonchalantly***

***walks away into the secret bunker***


	18. A Dragon, Part 1

**And for my long absence, two chapters in one! Not really, though the length would suggest otherwise. (In case you missed the update alert or the scroll bar, this one's my biggest doorstopper yet, at 22K+ words. But, broken up into six sections so ... pace yourself.) When I saw how long this was getting, I seriously considered breaking it up into two chapters, but the first half of the chapter is mostly set-up and the latter half delivery, so it seemed more appropriate as one release. And this way I get to end on a cliffhanger, which reminds me...**

***steps into flame-retardant jumpsuit***

**Yeah, this is another benchmark chapter, similar to chapters 12 and 7, to which I expect a strong reaction. You know, once you actually get done reading it. And if any of you missed it, I also have a one-shot released this past April about the birth of Zuko's son, appropriately titled "Lu Ten." For extra emotional punch, you should read it right after this chapter. (If you then find yourself wondering, did she plan that? Yes. Yes, I did.)**

**Thank you so much to those readers of Dominion who've found and reviewed my little one-shot, and to everyone who reviewed last chapter. To address some questions/comments: We learn quite a bit more this chapter about Azula's plans and the consequences of Zuko's unhealthy fixation on her abuse. I also hope that it's more understandable where Mai is coming from this chapter, with two sections from her POV. It's a fine line to walk between realistic and sympathetic with Mai, because I do enjoy her character very much, but I can't imagine she would react well to events herein.**

**Reader comments on Zuko's shift in perspective and the effects of Azula's abuse on them both were very perceptive. We will learn more about Ursa and her relationship to her children as the story progresses. From what I've seen of her in fanfiction and what little we were given to work with in canon (not including The Search under that label, personally) I think my interpretation may be rather unique. And I hope you enjoy it, though that remains to be seen, as this chapter concerns ... other matters.**

**I've also always thought little!Azula's comments about Azulon being replaced and Ozai being a better choice as Fire Lord came straight from her father. This is why we don't let kids vote, folks. 'Cause they're unduly influenced by their parents' opinions, and not yet informed and rational enough to make their own independent decisions. (Neither are many adults of voting age, for that matter, but they only lack the will, not the capacity.)**

**A lot of fans point to this as early evidence of her sociopathy, like she pulled these conclusions out of thin air. Far more likely I think, that she's simply repeating what she heard from Ozai, running it past her mother and Zuko to confirm the validity of that opinion or impress them with how much she knows. Kinda sad how badly that backfired, into comments like "What is wrong with that child?"**

**Opening salvos of the war referenced last chapter finally appear. As some readers expressed concern, I'm very curious to see what you make of it. Though of course, given developments, you will probably want to comment on ... other things. Please comment on it all; two months out from my last update, I'm craving some feedback!**

**Also, thank you thank you thank you to Meneldur for betaing the first half of the chapter! (Which, as discussed, is more closely equivalent to a full chapter.) You're a trooper, and this story and the writing process would not be the same without your valued input.**

**Well, chapter is already long, and this author's note is getting there, so let me just conclude by noting: Like Sokka, Mai is a Troper. I am also aware that "Xue" is not pronounced the same as "Sue", but wanted to make the reference more culturally relevant, hence, "Purity Xue". (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)**

**Also, happy reading. Also, please leave a review :)**

* * *

If this was supposed to be war, Aang thought, it didn't feel like the last one they fought.

It seemed he and Katara had barely arrived in Omashu and begun regular patrols of the surrounding area in expectation of Azula, before they encountered the first signs of trouble. Iroh had freed his eel hound to travel on Appa with them. As a firebender, it was perhaps not surprising that he was the first to spot the smoke rising.

Villages were burning, along the twin forks north of Omashu and even in the disputed territories, whose mountainous terrain had frustrated Fire Nation conquest even at the height of the war. Earth Kingdom villages. That much at least was familiar, even if it made Aang sick to think this could still happen, after everything they fought for…

And though the three arrived in time to lend their bending talents to rescue and containment efforts, they always seemed to arrive too late to catch the culprits. Most victims were too scared or disoriented to say with much certainty what had happened, but others claimed it was the work of Fire Nation soldiers.

Iroh was furious, one of the few occasions in almost five years of friendship that Aang had ever observed him so. The old general insisted Zuko would never order attacks against unarmed civilians, would never break the peace they fought so hard to achieve. He said the sequence of these attacks was suspicious, pointing toward a northward progression when Fire Nation troops in the colonies must by necessity march south. Katara even had to talk him down from a confrontation with some angry villagers, though Iroh looked properly abashed afterward at getting sucked into an argument with people who had lost their homes and livelihoods and in some cases even family members.

By the time they found their first Fire Nation colony buried in a landslide, Iroh had gone from livid to grim. There was nothing he could do to ease the suffering of the people there besides help organize their relocation. Katara at least could heal broken bones and gashes where she found them, while most of the heavy lifting and rescue efforts were left to Aang, and what earthbenders the town could muster. Iroh pointed out coldly that while anyone could start a fire, it took demolitions experts or earthbenders to cause devastation on this scale.

Aang wanted to believe him. He didn't want to think Zuko could have provoked these attacks by sending troops into the Earth Kingdom … in retaliation for his sister's death? But they had had no more news of the fugitive princess, and Iroh with his connections always seemed to be the first to know. And Zuko was not the sort to punish indiscriminately for something that hadn't even been these people's fault. Probably.

But this was not the work of his hand, and Aang had no way of knowing how much control Zuko actually exerted over an army half a world away. Or how explicit he might think to be in his orders, with the grief of losing a sister hanging over his head. Even if Azula was psychotic, and they were long-estranged. Aang never had siblings that he knew of, but he had a feeling such an unhappy history might make the loss even more bitter.

If Azula had even been killed, that is. Aang had to remind himself they didn't know. They knew surprisingly little for all the high-level meetings with self-important legates and diplomats and generals and even Kuei himself that had brought Aang to this morning's meditation, seated lotus style on the balcony of the lavish rooms of the Earth King's palace that he shared with Katara, whenever they stayed in Ba Sing Se. Truthfully, he would have preferred a simple bedroll under the stars, or the austerity of a sleeping cell at any of the Air Temples he and his wife were working to restore. But Kuei was a friend of sorts, and it would be bad form to turn down his invitation. Not to mention potentially sparking a diplomatic incident.

Aang sighed. He would never wish for a return to the days of living on the run, under constant threat from a Fire Nation whose reach encompassed much of the known world. But there had been a stark simplicity to it, for all that. High as the stakes were then, he would either win or die. There was no middle ground.

But this healing, fractious world after the war — It was one Aang was still trying to find his place in, even four years later. It didn't help his growing sense of obsolescence that he was still the last airbender. The genocide at the Air Temples was carried out with ruthless efficiency, and Sozin and his ilk had had a hundred years subsequent to hunt down any airbenders those first attacks missed.

No descendants of his lost people had come forward after the war ended, and none of his numerous Air acolytes showed any signs of the art. These adopted the teachings and culture of the airbenders with great enthusiasm, even coming to live at the temples and assist in restoring them.

But it wasn't enough. He was the last.

Sometimes Aang wondered if even the Avatar had a place. He was the Bridge between the worlds, but it wasn't worlds that needed bridging now, but nations and peoples divided by old hatreds, each with their own ideas of justice and right, and what they were owed…

His questions and suggestions alike seemed to fall on deaf ears, so much wind to all the faces that talked at him, talking and saying nothing. He began to understand some of Toph's impatience with this city and the people in it, whose faces had blended together in his mind of late, alike as they were in politely thwarting him. He might as well be a breeze trying to budge a boulder. It just wasn't happening.

His one consolation was that Katara stayed by his side throughout. Like her own element, she had a talent for working at the chinks and cracks in anyone's defenses, could reach deep inside and split you wide open, whether you willed it or no. But the bureaucrats and the Council of Five presented a united front, and her anger swelled only to break over them like waves upon a rocky shore instead, her energy dissipated while they stood unaffected. She would not have the time she needed to wear them down. None of them had that time.

They could not even sort the sequence of the attacks, the reports of survivors contradicting each other and sometimes even suggesting simultaneous strikes. Aang doubted the people they talked to were lying, more likely just traumatized and grieving and confused.

King Kuei and the Council of Five both insisted they had issued no orders for their armies to engage Fire Nation troops or move against civilians, even in retaliation for the villages burned. They were as shocked and outraged as Aang himself to learn of it. Moreso, Kuei added resentfully, considering it was his own people being preyed upon so shamelessly by a nation that claimed peaceful intentions, in what was supposed to be a time of peace.

The Council of Five was more circumspect, admitting the buried Fire Nation colonies were likely the work of earthbenders. They suggested General Fong might be responsible, as he had disappeared with his entire command after failing to capture Princess Azula, when she was discovered and run to ground outside the Foggy Swamp.

The Council of Five was making every effort to find Fong and hold him to account. But the Earth Kingdom was an entire continent, they added when Aang expressed his impatience. How could they be expected to put out every little brush fire, when they were still recovering from a hundred years of Fire Nation abuses?

The Council added that Fire Lord Zuko must understand their position, given his own difficulties mopping up rogue factions of his army in the first years of his reign. They were confident the Fire Lord had not ordered the burning of Earth Kingdom villages. That Zuko would condemn these attacks and withdraw his troops to the colonies proper, until justice could be done and recompense made. The Earth Kingdom generals did not add, _Or else_, but the implication was clear regardless.

Aang breathed deeply and squared his slumped shoulders, wishing he could know what Iroh would make of this. The old general had a wealth of experience to offer, from his years fighting these same Earth Kingdom armies to his work with the Order of the White Lotus. But it was exactly this experience that prompted Uncle to remain behind.

The loss of life in Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation villages alike had already sparked fighting between their respective troops along the borders of the colonies. Bumi had volunteered his own men and his influence in that corner of the Earth Kingdom to help keep hostilities in check, while Iroh went among the colonial army to do much the same. The fighting had only come to an end in most cases through Aang's personal intervention, and insistence that both armies withdraw to their respective territories. But the border of the Fire Nation colonies wasn't clean, and villages claiming allegiance to either nation lay along both sides of the waterway.

While he wasted time here being shunted from one unhelpful bureaucrat to the next, fighting could break out again at any moment. They would be at war again, unless Aang could find some way to fix this…

He didn't know how to fix this.

A pair of slim, dark arms hugged him from behind, when Katara knelt behind Aang with knees to either side of him, her chest pressed against his back and head laid sideways on his bare shoulder. "You're so tense," she murmured, her fingers running up the ridges of his abdomen.

And Aang smiled, his heart lifting a little already when he reached up to grip one of her hands and squeeze it in thanks. "I have a lot to think about," he admitted.

"_We_ have a lot to think about," Katara corrected, nuzzling his back and tickling him with the loose waves of her hair in result. "I think we should go," she put forth reluctantly, and Aang shifted to face her, breaking her hold in concern. He thought she must have just woken, when Aang saw she wore only her smallclothes and chest-bindings that bared her toned midriff.

"You're sure?" He knelt opposite her in the weak winter sunlight, their soft voices barely disturbing the birdsong and soft fall of water in the fountain in the garden below. "We haven't been here that long." _Even if it feels like ages_. "And where would we go? The Fire Nation?"

His wife shrugged frankly. "Well, Zuko's a closer friend than Kuei," she reasoned, looking embarrassed to speak it aloud. "And he holds more actual power in his country. Maybe he could get us faster results."

Seeing Aang's teasing grin, she admitted, "And if I get one more **non**answer from these pampered palace bureaucrats, I'm gonna waterwhip someone."

Aang laughed for the first time in probably a few days, even knowing that person was entirely likely to be him. "Well, when you put it like _that_…"

She darted forward impulsively to kiss him, and pressed her forehead to Aang's when she breathed, "I knew you'd see things my way."

"You're very persuasive," he warmly replied, laying a hand along the edge of her dusky face while Katara mirrored the gesture. "But I'll ask Toph and Sokka to take our place here," he added slowly, finding it hard to maintain a coherent train of thought when she pressed close like she did then, the tip of her snub nose brushing his. "Toph knows the city. Sokka can handle diplomatic things if —"

Katara cut him off with another kiss, longer and more insistent this time. Her bare arms looped about his neck, and a familiar heat kindled in the seat of his stomach before she broke it. "Enough about them," his wife sighed impatiently. "We deserve a proper send-off."

Even hoping she would say that, Aang couldn't help but chuckle, "_Again? _Spirits, Katara!" He recalled their coupling last night, so lengthy he almost overslept his morning meditation. "The full moon was three days ago," he reminded, grinning bemusedly at the knowing twinkle in her blue eyes. "What's gotten into you?"

"_You've_ gotten into me," she teased smiling, her teeth tugged gently at his lip when his arms came around her waist. "You could again, if you give your mind a rest, and listen to your body."

Aang didn't need to be told twice, laying Katara on her back on the polished stone tiles of their private balcony to kneel between her legs and kiss her on their way down. He paused on hands and knees above her a moment to admire the sight she made, flushed from kissing with a lazy smile curving her lips, the waves of her hair spread like a dark halo on the floor beneath her head.

"We're still learning each other," she spoke as if anticipating his thoughts, reaching up to grip his waist and urge Aang closer. "I don't need a full moon to want that." _To want _you, she didn't need to add, when Aang knew this part of their relationship, young as it still was, was so much more than the ebb and flow of their bodies' natural rhythms.

"When you've learned all of me —" Aang didn't phrase it as a question, but Katara still knew what he meant, surging up to capture his mouth with hers, drawing him in.

"You've lived a hundred hundred lifetimes," Katara whispered when they broke apart, her eyes locked on his when she pulled him on top of her. "I don't think that'll happen any time soon."

Aang smiled softly, reassured. And bent to meet her.

* * *

Every time Azula closed her eyes, all she saw was water. All around her, cold and lightless, enveloping her like the depths of the ocean, pressure squeezing the air from her lungs…

It didn't always happen right away. Sometimes the memory crept up insidious as a rising tide, and her body's physical reaction threw her out of the meditative state she worked to achieve. Other times, her dreams veered abruptly into that dark place, to launch her up, panting with heart hammering, from her thin bedroll and itchy blanket and the rock-hard floor of her sleeping cell in the temple of the Earth Avatars.

More often, it made her have to pee. The need for frequent bathroom breaks had been a source of annoyance since early in her pregnancy, but never such an obstacle to her goals. How was she supposed to maintain deep meditation when a growing uterus and shrinking bladder sent to her to the bathroom every five minutes? That was probably an exaggeration, she grudgingly admitted, but not much of one.

She had meditated with little trouble at the banyan grove tree, despite being in comparable physical discomfort. And breathing and meditation exercises had never frustrated her like they did Zuzu, since Azula was more patient even as a child, and mindful of the benefits to her firebending. Not that she ever much _liked_ meditation, but she was good at it. She was good at most everything.

It could only be her escape from the swamp that was tripping her up, what happened when they were almost captured…

Shouts onshore had alerted Azula and her party they were spotted, and the canoes were not robust enough to stray far from land. So instead, the boat propelled by waterbending alongside hers had sped off to draw pursuit. Her own canoe was swallowed by the black waters.

Azula supposed in hindsight that it was an impressive feat of bending, through the combined efforts of the half-dozen swampbenders packed into the canoe with her. The boat in its pocket of precious air shot beneath the choppy waves, nearly as fast as before they were sunk. They kept their bearing and didn't hit any obstacles, apparently guided by waterbending when sight failed. There was even enough air for them to breathe despite Azula hyperventilating, though she was in no position to appreciate that at the time.

The moonless night left them in near-absolute darkness beneath the waves, and water dripped down on them in fat globs, threatening at any moment to rush in. It was all Azula could do not to panic. Her breath came fast, the desperate urge to light the darkness, to boil the water away with her fire while she still could was almost overwhelming, even knowing rationally as she did that it would give away their position to the soldiers making for their craft onshore. Not to mention how quickly her blue flames would eat up their limited air supply.

The tribesmen had to hear her hyperventilating, and Azula wondered in a moment of sudden detachment if they could smell the fear-sweat on her, just like the ointment that betrayed her pregnancy to them. She had not realized she was shaking until Anyu grabbed her wrists in the darkness from the seat across from hers to soothe, "Jest keep calm. We practiced fer this. We'll have ya back up top in no time."

She might have said more or repeated herself. But Azula didn't hear it, just drew in a shaky breath and exhaled it where she huddled between two much larger men, and breathed in and then out again, blinking tears from her eyes.

That was how the water peasant got her, encasing Azula in ice without breath enough to burn her way free. She should have guessed what the little rat had planned, when Katara sucked in a deep breath before bending the water from the cistern up around them both. But her mind was too frantic, too full of Zuko falling to her lightning, falling for her tricks again like the fool he was _she would prove that they were fools to choose him_ and the fire of the comet in her veins and the ache in her chest that she thought must be hatred, hatred for this stupid girl who Zuko chose _not even family_ who just as much as Zuko cost her her friends and her father's love _she gave him everything he said he wanted and he still left_ —

Her mind was too full to notice the chains in her hands or even to stop and think, _Why would she turn and face me, knowing she has no chance?_ But the waterbender had all the chance she needed, when Azula's own mind betrayed her. For a long time after, there was nothing she could trust…

When the swampbenders finally put her ashore, the way they looked at Azula was humiliating. And she deserved it. Wasn't she supposed to be past this? What were all those hours in the cooler for, but to harden herself to that defeat and resolve never to repeat it? But it seemed she had only hardened herself to the cold.

This was ridiculous, she told herself again, seated lotus style on her bedroll in a corner of the cell. Azula managed fine underwater, the night she escaped from the asylum. Even almost drowning when she sailed from Kyoshi Island hadn't shaken her like this. _But that was different_, the thought came unbidden. _That wasn't waterbending_.

Bent water felt different to her. Which was stupid, again, she wasn't a waterbender. But still, it felt … hostile. Alien. She hated it. Even Anyu's healing water made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck, despite glowing a shade reminiscent of her own fire. To be surrounded _trapped_ by her opposing element — It was like reliving that defeat.

Azula never had a chance to test her skills against other forms of bending until she started chasing the Avatar and his group. She had studied and practiced for that eventuality, of course. She was nothing if not prepared. But reading and training alone were not the same as practical experience. Integrating forms from other bending disciplines into her own katas made her style of fighting unique and harder to defend against. But it did less to strengthen her own defenses.

It wasn't like Father could just haul out some of the waterbenders from their maximum security prisons for her to practice on. Appearances had to be maintained, and putting weapons in the hands of hardened prisoners invited trouble. There was a fine line between confidence and foolishness, and Azula had a feeling that would be crossing it.

This might be the one advantage Zuko had against her otherwise superior bending. The years he spent in exile and the months chasing and tangling with Team Avatar and their allies had conditioned him to fight against benders of other elements. Zuko would either learn or die — doubtless what Dad intended in banishing him — and he proved what he learned when he fought beside her, in the crystal catacombs of Old Ba Sing Se.

For the first time in longer than she could recall, Zuko had surprised her, impressed her even. When he broke the water peasant's immobilizing hold on her, when he came to her defense, Azula realized — It felt good to have him at her back. He was good at this, maybe even better than her.

It rankled, of course, to admit he could be better than her at anything, but with that admission came the prospect that maybe, at last, he had something real to offer. And it made her own offer to restore his place more justifiable to Father. If he really had changed… Azula let herself think _hope_ that he could be her brother, in truth this time. Zuko would never surpass her, of course, but in time and with her help, he might grow to be her equal, and why not? They shared the same blood. She wouldn't have to be alone…

Then, of course, he ruined everything. Spat on her and the trust she put in him, and left her worse off than before. He took everything from her and had the nerve to tell her _she_ did wrong, that bastard. That bastard.

She hated him.

She wished she always hated him, _only_ hated him. That would make this so much easier, Azula thought, laying a hand on the barely perceptible curve of her abdomen. It would make her feel like that much less of a fool.

Azula had felt like a fool more than once, in the four or five days since she arrived at the Southwest Rock Spire. The only Avatar Temple on the western continent, the Spire was not merely shaped like a peak, but built upon and earthbent into the summit of a vast mount, so that it climbed upward in successively smaller tiers. Not unlike the nearby city of Omashu, but on a much smaller scale. Azula sighted the collapsed entrance to the famous Cave of Two Lovers on her ascent.

She had never seen architecture that so closely mimicked and blended with its natural environment. She had to poke around the exterior of the temple for almost an hour before one of the sisters came out to greet her. This temple was given over to women sages, while its counterpart in the mountains north of Ba Sing Se was segregated to men.

Azula was admitted as a novice with few questions asked. As she had suspected, the isolation and near self-containment of the lofty temple left its inhabitants ignorant of her fugitive status. She was given an ankle-length dress of spun cotton with high collar and flowing sleeves to wear, and a long wool tunic dyed pale green and open at the sides with a white-gold sash to belt it — and assigned to a sleeping cell smaller than her most modest closets at the palace. As a mere novice, she was at least spared the necessity of wearing the hideous wimples she observed among the higher orders.

To complete the indignity, she was required along with other new initiates to scrub floors, weed the gardens, wash the green-glass windows, beat dust from tapestries, launder robes and linens, prepare and clean up after every other meal, and complete other menial tasks. It was a good thing Azula actually _liked_ cleaning (an extension of her talent for imposing order) or she doubted she would be able to bear it, even to bring herself that much closer to her goal.

It was the only way, she would remind herself with gritted teeth, when the hours after sundown found her on all fours with a scrub brush in her hands. This wasn't a ship she could stow away on. She had no way of knowing how long she would be … _out_, when she finally reached the Spirit World. Azula would be vulnerable for that time, and she had to belong here, be expected here, by then. Or she might well wake to find herself in a prison cell.

Of course, there were drawbacks. Her chores and instruction, shared mealtimes and devotions — which she slept through covertly, more often than not — left Azula with only late evenings and the hours before sunrise to meditate alone in her cell, and attempt to reach the Spirit World, so far without success.

It should have happened by now, she thought again, shifting on the bedroll to relieve a cramp in her back, and lay hands palms-up on her bent knees again, fingers joined. Avatar Temples were supposed to be gateways to the Spirit World, the only sort she could think of that would be prominently displayed on a map. Accounts of Roku's reappearance at his temple on the Winter Solstice clearly confirmed that idea. And Azula knew she was capable. She had been meditating nearly as long as she was able to bend.

_And_ she was a descendant of Avatar Roku. Shouldn't she have some access to the Spirit World too, even if diluted? Her old fuddy duddy uncle did this, if the rumors were to be believed. The bald twelve year monk old did this. Why couldn't she?

At any other time, Azula would have found the revelation of her secret heritage hard to swallow. When Iroh told her in her first months in asylum, she was too far gone to respond, or even think on what he said. Like so much of her early imprisonment, those memories were lost to her, until she began meditating in a deliberate effort to recover them. While her nights in the asylum were given over to training, that was the work of her days.

She might not have been ready to hear it then, but when at last she remembered, it made a sort of sense. The stories about the Spirit World and heroes of legend, shamen and tricksters and guardian spirits that their mother would tell Zuko when he was very young, stories Azula hid outside his door to listen to — Maybe they weren't just stories, but indicative of Ursa's unusual background.

After all, who would know more about the Spirit World than the Avatar, or his family? If she were a descendant of the Bridge to the Spirit World, might Ursa have the ability to seek refuge there? And if her mother became trapped there, it would certainly explain why news of precious Zuzu's coronation never brought her crawling back, why all his efforts to find her failed. _Even _Zuko_ couldn't be that incompetent_, she thought.

Azula did **not** let herself think that maybe she had latched on to this theory as her only real chance to rid herself of the hallucination. That her own inability to enter the Spirit World cast serious doubt on the idea that Ursa could. That her mother was likelier to be buried in an unmarked grave somewhere than assumed bodily into the realm of spirits, and even finding her alive was no guarantee of a sound mind…

This was not merely her best idea. It was her only one. (The phrase "just crazy enough to work" came to mind.) And Azula would see it through before she wasted one more minute of her life in that thrice-damned asylum. All she had to do was enter the Spirit World without any guidance or training in the undertaking, and against the dual distractions of her unwanted duties —

A brisk knock sounded at her warped wood door, painted with the green squares of morning light that shone through the panes of her narrow window. Azula grimaced and finished her thought —

_And the other girls_.

"Breakfast is served, Silent Sister," sang out a chipper voice on the other side, and Azula grit her teeth at the nickname. No one would have dared inflict her with one when she was princess of the Fire Nation, but a few days of her aloofness had caused the other novices to joke that the "Duchess" (their appellation) must have taken an early vow of silence, such as some sworn sisters voluntarily adopted in their service.

Better jibes about her being unsociable and taciturn than snobbish, she supposed. It would draw far less suspicion in a place like this than the latter accusation, however unfairly earned. Though Azula could admit in hindsight it might have been a mistake to correct that girl's grammar. But really, who could blame her? It was like listening to Zuzu talk.

"Don't be fashionably late," the novice warned unkindly from the other side of the door, and Azula resisted the urge to set it on fire. "I know _you_ wouldn't want to miss it." _Since you're eating for two_, she didn't add. She didn't need to.

Most of the other novices were about the same age as Azula, or a few years her junior. Though they probably thought her younger than she was, due to her short stature. They gossiped and jockeyed for position among themselves and with their superiors every bit as shamelessly as her classmates at the Royal Fire Academy for Girls, given free reign by the lax sage who instructed them. As the new arrival, Azula found herself the object of that gossip more often than not. With the rather obvious disadvantage that this time, she could not use her firebending or royal station or even really her wit to establish herself as their superior, and by extension, untouchable.

These stupid chits were lucky she was a wanted fugitive, Azula thought bitterly, and not for the first time. It didn't make her feel any better.

She knew most of them already suspected she was pregnant. The loose robes and a cleverly tied sash hid her bump, still small enough to pass off as a few extra pounds. But with the temple situated near enough to the encroaching desert, rainfall was limited. Most of their water supply came from ice-melt and glacial run-off, and showers were communal to preserve the scarce resource. No matter how carefully she timed her ablutions, Azula always seemed to run into someone. And while the right clothes could still hide it, her condition was obvious enough when she was naked.

No matter. The sages and sisters who ran this show had yet to say anything about it to her. And she would hardly be the first noblewoman packed off to a convent or the like to wait out an unwed pregnancy, even if it was more common in the Fire Nation to send daughters to distant relatives for their confinement, or country estates for the more well off. Azula planned to be long gone before it got to that point anyway.

She just had to get to the Spirit World first. But that would wait another tedious day, it seemed.

Azula climbed silently to her feet and wrenched the door open, unsurprised when the taller girl dressed in the same modest rags as her nearly tumbled through it where she stood listening at the keyhole. Azula arched a brow, and coolly replied, "Thank you for telling me. Your unassuming kindness is an example to us all."

When the long-faced novice purpled and could make no coherent reply beyond an indignant sputter, Azula indulged in winking at her, the quickest twitch of her brow. She saved her smirk until she stepped into the hall, pulling the door to the cell closed behind her.

Azula promised herself that the next time she opened that door, she would find the answers she sought here.

* * *

She was going to need her own study now too, Mai noted to herself, when Zuko burst in on her trying to read in his one evening. She laid aside the latest report of casualties and damages sustained in continued fighting in the colonies, and stood from the chair at his desk. Her sleep-deprived husband only then seemed to register her presence in the room.

"Mai!" he exclaimed, as if woken abruptly from a dream, probably the worst kind. "Have you seen it? I can't find them anywhere!"

"Seen what?" Mai flatly replied, hands tucked into her trailing sleeves. Though she had a good idea…

"The scroll," he spoke impatiently, beginning to pick up and set down other articles in search of it. "Azula's medical records. I left it in my rooms just this morning, but now it's gone —"

"I put it in the palace archives, Zuko," Mai sighed, before he could really get going. "Where it belongs."

He stopped short and turned on her. "What — Why didn't you _tell_ me?" he demanded, gripping his hair as if to pull it out by the roots. "I thought I was going **crazy!**"

Zuko certainly looked the part, nearly as haggard and wild-eyed as the morning after he burned Ozai, even in the formal robes and headpiece of the Fire Lord. The servants Mai had to reassign until he stopped irrationally hating them might have something to say about it too. Their absence would at least explain the stubble and half-assed topknot coming loose down the back of his fool head. Mai fought the increasing urge to slap him.

_I'm not sure you _aren't_ going crazy_, she thought but didn't say. Apparently, she didn't have to say it. Zuko scowled at her silence. "Why did you take them? I need —"

"_No_, you **don't**," Mai snapped, fingers clenched. "You talked to her doctors two weeks ago," she spoke resignedly, suddenly tired, and let her hands drop. Though it had probably been longer, with the growing crop of problems foreign and domestic this undeclared war had sown running them ragged. "We both know what they said."

Zuko colored and looked down at the reminder, but Mai persisted, "Why would you _keep_ reading something like that?" She shook her head. "It's not healthy."

He cringed, having probably deluded himself she didn't know. "I just feel like I owe —" And Zuko stopped, stilled. "Wait…" he said slowly, moved closer with brow furrowed. "You _read_ them?" And it was Mai's turn to look away. "I'm so glad —"

"I'm not."

He gently took her arm, she saw his scarred face soften out the corners of her eyes. "I know it's hard," he spoke quietly, and Mai cursed the tightness in her voice, in her chest. One of them had to be rational about this. "But now that you, uh, _know_ — We can talk about it, decide what to do…"

Mai barked out a harsh laugh. Zuko looked hurt, and let go of her. "_Do?_" she echoed coldly. "It happened years ago."

"I _know_ that, okay?" He crossed arms defensively over his chest. "But the point is, she could've been different! She could've been … **better**. Maybe she could still be." Zuko shrugged and spread his hands helplessly, like he couldn't decide how to stand. "We couldn't help Azula back then, but maybe —"

He held out his hand palm up, as if offering the possibility. "Maybe we could help her now."

As usual, it was left to her to voice the obvious question. "_How?_"

"I don't _know_, alright?!" Zuko snapped, losing patience. "Obviously, that's **why** I want to talk about it!"

"You want to talk about it," Mai deadpanned. "Have you even _thought_ about it?" Stupid question. If he could be convinced to think before he acted, they wouldn't be in this mess. Well, most of it, anyway. "What exactly do you _want_ to happen?"

Her husband hesitated, but his mismatched eyes spoke clearly what he struggled to put into words. Mai crossed her arms and huffed out a sigh. "Let's just assume you find Azula before everyone else out for her blood," she put forth. "What are you going to do? Give her a hug, and hope she doesn't try to **kill** you?" She didn't add _again_, when Mai caught his flinch.

"What am I s'posed to say?" She glared at the gray stone floor, hating the sudden tremor in her voice, small enough that anyone else but Mai would have missed it. "Sorry I never noticed your dad _raped_ you?" Her voice caught on the word, and his mouth moved to speak her name in comfort or maybe reproach, but no sound emerged. Zuko tried to reach for her, but stopped himself. He looked like he might start crying.

Part of her wished he would, the part that thought it might relieve the angry weight that settled like a lump of burning coal in the pit of her stomach, when an all-day war meeting removed the nuisance of Zuko looking over her shoulder, and Mai was free to read the medical records alone. The weight of awful realization, when she compared the notes and dates to remembered words and signs and gestures that didn't make sense at the time, but now —

Now she knew, was forced to admit. It happened. She thought she even knew when it started, more precisely than Iroh. Azula had turned up training injuries for as long as Mai knew her, and became either so hostile or dismissive when Mai drew attention to it that she had long since learned to stop asking. Ty Lee was slower to learn, but Azula had always been more forgiving of her anyway.

But one day at school, she remembered Azula was … different. She had become nearly intolerable after her brother was banished, bragging endlessly about the advantages and attention lavished on her as a newly installed crown princess, while Ty Lee nodded enthusiasm and exclaimed at all the right moments. And Mai wanted to pull her stupid braid because _didn't she know Azula's gain was Zuko's loss?_ and _didn't she care about the soulful boy Mai was supposed to marry one day, who paid for being better than the whole rest of his family by getting burned and banished?_

Worse still was when the princess would dwell on the Agni Kai Mai's parents hadn't let her attend _an unfortunate turn of events, but they would make her a better match than a banished prince_ or cruelly speculate what misadventures Zuko and her hated uncle were getting up to in their shared exile, until Ty Lee squirmed in discomfort and Mai wanted to claw Azula's eyes out.

That Azula knew this, she had no doubt. Sometimes the princess would look right at Mai, smoky eyes smiling — what self-respecting eleven year old wore _makeup_ anyway? — as if to say, _you will never dare to raise a hand against me_. Until the day she finally did.

Mai had disliked Azula before then, for the way she condescended to Ty Lee or snapped at the poor girl when she was too slow on the uptake, for the way she treated her brother the prince. But Mai thought that was when she started truly hating her, when she saw how Azula relished in Zuko's disgrace, how she kept talking about it, about _him_ long after it was appropriate.

Except for the day she remembered now, when they passed an entire lunch period before Mai realized Azula hadn't said a word. It probably wouldn't have registered if Ty Lee hadn't pointed out nervously (trying to pass it off as a joke to avoid her wrath) that the princess was even quieter than Mai today.

Not that Azula talked that much, even then. And next to Ty Lee, anyone else would seem like a mute. But she was right. Azula hadn't raised her hand once in any of the classes they shared that day, when she was usually the first to volunteer answers. (This had earned the princess an early reputation as a teacher's pet, before everyone realized Azula bullied her teachers every bit as much as her classmates.)

But even when she was silent, Azula always had this overwhelming sense of presence about her that Mai attributed to her being royalty, until she met Zuko and felt the difference. Azula was always watching, weighing, judging. Plotting. That day at lunch when she answered Ty Lee, her voice emerged perfectly level, she sounded like herself. But her eyes were empty. It was like she was somewhere else entirely.

Azula sat stiffly, moved stiffly, when she had never let what she called training injuries impair her calculated grace before. Such small tells for the enormity of what was done to her, that Mai doubted anyone who didn't know her well would even notice. And no one knew her well, besides Mai and Ty Lee. The princess didn't exactly invite confidences or questions about her well-being.

Outwardly, Azula was back to normal (for her) in a few days' time, with what Mai realized when she read the records were only occasional relapses. Azula had always adjusted to monstrous cruelty with disturbing ease. It seemed this was the case even when it was inflicted on her.

That first time wasn't dated in her medical records, but Mai thought it wouldn't be. A violated daughter was probably too obvious even for Ozai to parade before his royal physician without urgent need. He probably just sent her to the bath when he was done with her, to erase the evidence…

The lump of coal in the pit of her stomach burned hotter. Mai blinked the stinging from her eyes, when Zuko touched her arm in concern. Azula was always a bitch, even before this happened. But no one deserved that. Not even her.

Mai let out a long breath, before she finally told him, "It doesn't change anything."

Zuko blinked and started, "Of _course_ it —" before she cut him off sharply, "Functionally, **no**. It doesn't."

Mai stepped past him onto the ornate rug at the center of his study, eyes fixed on the paneled wall and fingers knotted. "She's still a threat. We know why she _is_ that way, fine. Maybe it's not even her fault," Mai conceded for the sake of argument and turned to face him, fixing him with a hard stare when she repeated, "It doesn't make her any less of a threat."

He made to argue the point before Mai anticipated him, "You know now, what does that change? You _tell_ her you know, and she'll fall **crying** into your arms?"

Zuko flushed crimson, and she realized this was probably exactly what he wanted. Mai pushed the thought aside, painful as it was. Time enough to dwell on his bizarre hang-ups later. Time enough to wonder if he ever would have told her, if she didn't find him out first…

"You can't _fix_ rape, Zuko —" she sighed, and just as quickly, he burst out, "Will you **stop** saying that?!" Mai gave him a look and he quieted, abashed.

"If Azula could be helped, you think she's going to let _us_ do it?" Mai resumed, preferring to argue this point over semantics. "Me, one more person who chose you? And you, who —" She let Zuko fill in whatever term was less offensive to him. "Well."

Her husband jerked as if stung, and objected, "Who the hell **else** does she have? _Ty Lee?_ She was only a minor noble before she joined the Kyoshi Warriors! I'm the only one with the power to **help** her!" He turned from Mai to pace the length of the study, and she thought, _Here we go again_.

"She doesn't _have_ to be a fugitive from her own nation!" Zuko argued, stooping with back turned to brace hands against the bloodwood of his desk. "I could **protect** her and the baby, if —" He stopped and bent his head.

_She could be convinced to trust you? _Mai surmised what even Zuko wasn't deluded enough to hope for, at least out loud._ Good luck with that_.

"And who's going to protect _you?_" Mai pointed out darkly, approaching to lay a calculated hand on his shoulder. "Or me, or our **son?**"

She frowned when she felt his tenseness even beneath the stiff leather mantle of the Fire Lord, and wondered when was the last time he slept without resort to the sedative herbs he demanded from Iroh. She had worried before now he might grow dependent on them. And Zuko told her he had not been able to drink the tea before bed lately, as it caused him to oversleep his early morning meetings.

Zuko glanced back at her, brow furrowed like he wasn't sure why she was touching him. Mai felt suddenly self-conscious, and dropped her hand. "You have bigger problems than what happened eight years ago," she argued anyway, crossing arms reflexively over her chest. "If you lose the colonies," Mai paused to let the words register, "you'll lose your throne."

Her husband stood but looked away, knowing it was true as surely as Mai did. There were too many old Fire Nation families, with properties passed down through generations in the colonies for Zuko to abandon these to the Earth Kingdom. But if the looming war proved he couldn't protect his people there, it would not be long before their cousins in the Homeland rose up in rebellion.

Mai left unsaid that if Zuko lost power, it was likely to cost all their lives. For all the frustrations that came with ruling, the alternative was even worse. No rival to the Burning Throne could afford to leave Zuko or his son or probably even _her_ alive. She drew a deep breath, marshaled her argument, "You have the Avatar and two of the world's best benders out looking for her. You have Sokka and what's-her-name, with the clown makeup. You have your uncle."

_You have me_, she thought but didn't say._ Even if you'll never know. Even if you wouldn't thank me. You have me to make the hard choices you can't._

"Maybe you should stop obsessing over her." Mai managed to keep her tone neutral, even if her eyes burned. Even if her fingers itched for a blade. "And focus on something you _can_ fix." She did not ask herself if maybe he couldn't fix this growing conflict. He had to fix it, for all their sakes.

But Zuko shook his head as if to shrug off her suggestion. He looked almost offended. "We can't just pretend it didn't happen!" His hands shook once before he clenched them. "That's what everyone did for years," he spoke darkly, tears starting to his eye when he glared away. "They were all _complicit_, they let him do — what he **did**."

Even Mai's patience had to reach a limit sometime, and that time was now. She snapped, "What were they supposed to _do_ about it, you idiot? He was the most **powerful** man in the world!" Zuko flinched from her yelling, but Mai thrust a pointer finger to his chest. "And in case you forgot, **she** was complicit in it too or she would've _fucking told someone!_"

Zuko slapped her hand away, livid. "So it's **her** fault this happened now? You _vindictive_ —"

Mai didn't let him finish that statement, talking over him, "Most of the servants you keep sending away didn't have anything to _do_ with her! And **none** of them had a detailed account of her abuse like you do!" she fumed. "You sit there reading that shit and think it happened all day every day, like it was **just** as obvious to someone who was there, but it _wasn't_, okay? It **wasn't!**"

His face changed then, Zuko looked almost stricken when he tried to interrupt, "Mai, I don't —"

"What were they supposed to do?" Mai demanded, deaf to his pleas. "**Kidnap** her against her will and ship her off to Ba Sing Se? 'Cause there's _nowhere_ else he couldn't reach!" She threw a hand wide to underline the absurdity of it. "What was I supposed to do? **Kill** him in his sleep —"

"Mai, **stop!**" Zuko cried, grabbing her arms to contain her growing ire. "I _never_ blamed you!" He spoke quickly even though she threw him off. "My — Ozai sent your whole family away, I **know** that! And even before — you left school a year before her, I know you didn't —"

"Shut up," she spoke coldly, disdaining his pity. And Zuko fell silent, withered under her glare. "I don't need your absolution."

Mai half-turned to discourage further interruption, crossed her arms forbiddingly and resumed, "How was anyone supposed to help her, when she **lied** about this just like she lied about everything? _Azula always lies_," she reminded harshly, glancing sidelong at Zuko. "You used to know that." _Even if you forgot it every five minutes_.

_"_So what if she didn't tell the lie I _thought?_" Mai said almost to herself, and glanced away. "It was still a lie." Just like their so-called friendship. Azula was never her friend, but there was a time when Mai tried, when she thought — _I was hers_. Obviously not, if the princess couldn't be bothered to tell her, or even Ty Lee.

"The point isn't the lie, it's the _truth_ we both share now," Zuko spoke softly, his face painfully sincere when he tugged on her elbow so Mai turned toward him. It just made her angrier. That face was how he fooled her, that low voice rough with emotion — neither gave any hint what he was capable of. _You lied to me too_.

"She's too far away to help right now, but — We could help each _other_," Zuko whispered. His good eye shone with tears when he held fast to her arm with one hand, and reached with the other for her hard face. "We could help each other through this," he repeated solidly, moved closer. "If you would just **talk** to me —"

But his fingertips brushed her cheek at that moment, and Mai exploded, "You think I want to talk to _you_ about it?" He touched her like nothing had changed… "When you **did** —"

Zuko let go in alarm at her outburst, but kept arguing, "That's _why_ we need to talk about it! Ignoring the problem **hasn't** helped!" he insisted, following Mai when she drew back in disgust, hands held loosely at his sides in a placating gesture. "It _won't_ help! The only thing that's going to help now is total honesty."

He grasped her shaking hands, but Mai could have laughed in his face. He wanted to be honest _now?_

"I know it's hard," Zuko said again, like he knew anything about it when she would never betray him _never_ so long as she drew breath… "But you can tell me anything, ask me anything —"

"How's this for a question?" Mai demanded, the slow burn of resentment like a poison in her veins. "_Why is he still alive?_" Zuko stilled instantly, let her hands drop from limp fingers. He didn't have to ask who she meant, when Mai answered her own question, "I guess you couldn't even do that right."

Her husband flinched, let his head drop in shame but managed a glance up to whisper, "That's not fair." Tears streaked the right side of his face, it burned almost as red as his scar.

"And **any** of this is fair to me?" Mai rejoined, gestured sharply to herself for emphasis. "Any of it at all? I never _asked_ to be stuck between you two again!" The implied threat was clear, _And if you put me there, you might not like what I choose_.

Zuko turned such a wounded gaze on her in that moment that Mai almost broke, hugging his arms to his chest in silent reproach. But he couldn't summon a word in reply, and she demanded before he could manage, "Had enough of talking about it?"

His mismatched eyes narrowed in a glare, and Mai told him, "Good." She stepped right up to Zuko to chuck him under the chin. "Now get your **head** out of your ass, and do what you can to save the family you have _left_."

* * *

If Zuko's welcome on their last visit was less-than-welcoming, it was practically nonexistent this time. Katara and Aang touched down in the same courtyard they departed from three months ago. _How has it been that long?_ she took a moment to wonder, the lands they searched and the people they questioned and all the messages exchanged and days passed in the howdah blurring together in her mind for a moment.

They waited something like ten minutes for Zuko or at least one of his servants to escort them, unpacking their few possessions, freeing Appa of his saddle and getting him settled before they finally just decided to walk inside. At first they thought the palace was deserted. They encountered no servants and only a few imperial firebenders in the halls, who nodded tersely to them but ignored their questions. Which was strange, because they saw plenty of people gathered outside the gates of the palace, their dull roar of greeting borne up on the wind when Aang and Katara flew over.

A visibly tired General Iroh intercepted them on their way to their usual quarters near the royal apartments, dressed in the dark crimson of Fire Nation royalty and trailed by Zuko's bespectacled court chamberlain. The wary eyes he made at them were only slightly less reassuring than Iroh's strained smile. "Young Aang, Katara!" the old general greeted them. "What a nice surprise to see you again so soon."

"Yeah, we weren't making much progress in Ba Sing Se," Aang admitted, dropping the pack at his feet to shrug casually. "Thought we'd try our luck with Zuko." His chamberlain scowled. Katara still could not remember the old man's name.

"We didn't expect to find you here," Katara admitted to Iroh, glancing quizzically at him and shifting her pack to one shoulder. "Weren't you helping defuse tensions in the colonies?"

"I was," Iroh sighed, motioning for Aang to pick up his bag and leading the small party to their usual chambers. "But I realized my help was needed more here. Doubtless, you thought the same thing when you heard —" Katara glanced to her husband when Aang mouthed the question _Heard?_ but she could only shrug, "— but I'm afraid you may find a colder welcome than you hoped."

"What are you talking about?" Aang stopped in the middle of the cavernous hall, and Katara and the rest stopped with him. "People were _cheering_ our arrival!" Katara nodded agreement, but Iroh gave them an odd look.

"Those were protesters," he said slowly. "They … weren't cheering."

Aang looked as shocked she felt, when the chamberlain spoke up sourly, "It must be hard to make out realities on the ground, flying as high as you do —"

"Thank you, Master Han," Iroh said firmly. "Why don't you go assist my nephew?"

The middle aged man gave Uncle a cool look, before executing a polite flame salute to take his leave, "My lord general." Iroh sighed heavily and frowned after the chamberlain when he walked away, muttering almost too low to hear, "That man sorely needs a sense of humor…"

"Why are people protesting?" Katara asked for them both, when Iroh resumed leading her and Aang to their usual chambers. Her husband turned a searching gaze on the old general when Iroh replied.

"Fire Nation losses in the colonies. Besides what we witnessed, there are the recent relocations of entire villages along the border, and of course, the sabotage of several major munitions factories, a shameful deception —"

"What?" Aang spoke up, surprised. "When did this happen?"

Iroh flung open the iron door to their rooms to admit them, and said, "We received news of it only two days ago, but the attacks were spaced out over the week before." He waited on the threshold while Aang and Katara entered to drop their packs on a low-slung sofa in the sunlit antechamber, adding, "The damage may be worse than we know. Reports have been scattered and sometimes contradictory. And with fighting in the interior and the Earth Kingdom blockade of the Mo Ce Sea, flow of information and people has been limited."

Katara exchanged a worried glance with her husband. "We flew East," she told Iroh, wide-eyed. "We didn't even see it." But a blockade was not the work of a few days, and Katara realized a little angrily that this had to have been happening while they were still in Ba Sing Se.

"Clearly just as the Council of Five intended," Uncle darkly speculated, but held up a hand to interrupt when Aang made to reply. "You know my views, but I cannot stay and discuss this. Zuko has called an emergency meeting of his council, and I need to get back to it. I will see if one of Mai's agents can brief you more fully on the situation, in the meantime."

He turned to leave, but Aang stepped forward to call after him, "Wait! Shouldn't _I_ come too?"

Uncle gave him a look that was half-pitying, half-exasperated. "It is a meeting of **his** council, Aang," Iroh reiterated. "I know that you are only asking as Zuko's friend, but he must act first as _Fire Lord _in this. It would not do if you were seen to influence him, especially not now. I am sure my nephew will want to talk to you, and soon. But this meeting is an internal matter."

Seeing Aang's frustration, Katara stepped up beside him to put an arm around his waist. "Aang could at least talk to these protesters," she volunteered. "Explain the situation and —"

"You're not listening," Iroh said impatiently, and Katara was too surprised he would interrupt to even take offense. "Sentiment toward the other nations is too hostile among this lot; you would only incite them. Zuko has spoken to them and asked them to disperse. His imperial firebenders and the city's domestic forces will maintain crowd control. He is reluctant to take harsher measures at present, but he may have no choice if you upset this delicate balance. I must ask that you please do not act, until we've all had a chance to sit down and talk."

Aang pursed his lips, but nodded reluctantly. "Okay," he sighed, slumping a bit. "That sounds reasonable."

Iroh granted a sympathetic smile to add in parting, "Please make yourselves at home. I am sure you have had a long journey." Katara nodded confirmation, but Uncle was already leaving. So she looked to Aang still standing beside her, the same question reflected in his storm-gray eyes as had rooted in her mind: How did it all go so wrong?

The intelligence agent who arrived to brief them shortly after was able to give more specifics and the stances of both nations on events. But the nondescript man of indeterminate age, his voice and even his face utterly unremarkable as he related the facts, only succeeded in raising more questions.

The Council of Five claimed the sabotaged factories as the work of Nativist Earth Kingdom rebels. But this was more coordinated an effort than the Fire Nation had seen from them in some time. And effective targeting of infrastructure essential to the threatened war suggested inside information, and possible government sanction.

The blockade made its appearance around the same time. The Earth Kingdom justified it as a measure to prevent the Fire Nation from shipping more troops to the colonies, or landing them on Earth Kingdom shores when the border by land was already guarded. Zuko had dispatched part of his navy to meet them, and the fleets were locked in a tense standoff, as of last notice.

Though the Fire Nation held the superior navy, its Lord was reluctant to leave the homeland vulnerable by sending the ships needed to break the blockade. He had been sequestered in discussion with his councilors, nobles, and military officials for some time, discussing appropriate responses.

They thanked the man and let him return to his duties, before Aang and Katara lay down facing each other on the cloud-soft bed while light winter rain fell outside the open windows. She pressed her forehead to his, and they held each other and talked while they waited.

Aang admitted Zuko was beginning to look like the victim here, and Katara agreed but reminded him their most recent information came from the Fire Nation, so it might be biased. They both remembered several instances of native Earth Kingdomers uprooted from their homes and villages in the colonies, similar to the displaced colonists Iroh told them about.

It was hard to know what the Earth Kingdom was thinking with the blockade, since the Fire Navy could crush them if they mustered in force. Maybe they didn't intend to stand and fight, Katara speculated, and Aang grumbled that they were lucky Zuko and his admirals were showing restraint. Their old friend in particular wasn't known for it…

She lost track of how long they talked before drifting off to sleep, but Katara woke a few hours later to find the sun shining again and Aang comfortably spooning her, and smiled. She wiggled free without waking him and kissed the arrow tattooed on his forehead before she left their chambers.

Katara wandered the gleaming tile floors of his high-ceilinged halls a little restlessly, and wondered why Zuko hadn't seen them yet. It wasn't like him to keep her waiting, but she guessed this was the biggest crisis he had yet faced in his young reign. So distracted was she that Katara barely noticed Zuko's court chamberlain being accosted by a disgruntled nobleman around the corner from her, until she was almost upon them.

"I'm telling you, his schedule has changed!" the balding chamberlain objected, while his richly dressed partner crowded him into a shallow alcove to hiss, "You're supposed to _know_ his schedule."

"Everything is in place," the chamberlain rushed to reassure him. "It just needs time —"

But the nobleman's tanned face reddened in anger, and he snapped, "With this new informa—" He broke off abruptly on spotting Katara, and stepped away from the chamberlain to dust off his robes with conspicuous care.

"Master Katara," the nobleman greeted her flatly, executing a perfunctory bow while the chamberlain mopped his shining brow with a handkerchief. "You honor us with your presence."

Katara frowned at him and asked the nervous chamberlain instead, "Everything okay here?"

"Fine," the chamberlain replied, glaring at the nobleman who watched them sullenly. "_Some people _would just do well to remember I will schedule appointments with His Majesty when they come available."

The other man twitched irritably and bit out, "As you say. I will wait upon your convenience. Sir, madam," he took his leave with an impeccable flame salute and walked away.

Katara watched him go with a furrow between her brows, vaguely troubled while the court chamberlain tucked his handkerchief away, until he prompted her, "Can I help you?"

"Oh," she said, surprised, and remembered her purpose. "I wondered if Zuko's meeting let out? He hasn't sent for me and Aang."

The chamberlain looked not just uncomfortable now, but almost sad. "I believe he is spending time with his son," he answered slowly, glancing down. "If you must speak to him, you might find him in the nursery."

She didn't find him in the royal nursery, but seated beneath a bent old tree in a spacious garden walled off from the buildings around, as Lu Ten's nanny helpfully directed her. At the side of a pond neatly bordered by stones and whose ripples sparkled in the sunlight, his young son sat in his lap while Zuko helped him tear off small chunks of bread and feed these to the turtleducks that paddled around them, seeking food.

Though it seemed the toddler with his shortpants and tiny topknot was likelier to chuck the bread than lob it gently, giggling delightedly, "Ge-_wet!_" whenever he succeeded in splashing one. Katara smiled a little when she approached, to find amusement warring with fond exasperation on Zuko's face, while he tried to demonstrate the correct method of feeding turtleducks to the rambunctious prince. He bent his head to whisper something into Lu Ten's ink-dark hair, too low to hear, before Katara reached his side and he finally looked up.

"This was my mother's favorite place," Zuko told her in greeting, holding the bread just out of Lu Ten's reach, while his son stood up in his lap and strained against Zuko's arm to reach it. "I feel closer to her here."

Katara felt a pang of guilt for her purpose in seeking him out, when she caught the sadness in his eyes, hollow with lack of sleep. Much as she hated to disturb what peace Zuko had found this afternoon, the peace they all fought for those short years ago was more important. But before she could think how to broach the subject, Lu Ten succeeded in grabbing what remained of the loaf from his father's inattentive grasp and threw it whole into the pond, plunging one of the smaller turtleducks under the water before loaf and duck both bobbed back to the surface with a second splash and a ruckus of indignant quacking.

A strange look flitted over his scarred face, but vanished quickly as it came when Lu Ten turned his head to pipe up, "Gone!"

"You're very observant," Zuko said wryly, with a glance up at Katara that seemed to say, _He gets that from me_. She hid a grin behind her hand, while Zuko set the toddler down beside him to bid, "Why don't you go play?"

"Okay," Lu Ten said contently, tripping away while Katara watched him in wonder. _Spirits, do they always grow up that fast?_

Zuko slumped where he sat pondside, arms propped on his folded knees when he said, "It's good to see you."

"Really?" Katara said slowly, folding her legs to take a seat on the light stone beside him. "'Cause you didn't seem in any hurry about it."

Zuko sat straight as if stung and objected, "The war meeting just let out —"

"_War_ meeting?" Katara demanded, recoiling in disgust.

"You know what I **mean!**" Zuko hotly rejoined, hands balled into fists at his sides. "What else would you call it when —" He stopped himself with a grimace, and held up a hand to forestall her when Katara made to argue the point.

"Just **stop**, okay?" Zuko asked her wearily, and let his hand drop. "I understand your concern. But it feels like all I've been doing these past few days is talking about it, and — I just need _not_ to talk about it for a while."

He heaved a quiet sigh, his mismatched eyes following his son's progress, while Lu Ten combed through the grass behind them, picking out bugs and stones he found. "I just need some time with my son, to remind myself why I even put up with this. I'm supposed to be doing this for _him_, for his future," Zuko said almost to himself. "And I hardly get to see him anymore…"

He stopped, stiffened. And Katara knew a moment of confusion, before she picked up on what he heard. The sound of distant shouts beyond the walls, the ominous rumble of many angry people. Lu Ten abandoned what he was doing and scampered back to his father, who hugged him to his side when the boy whimpered.

"Shh, you're safe here," Zuko stopped glaring to soothe, rubbing a hand briskly up and down the toddler's back in reassurance, while the captain of his palace guard crossed the grass to take a knee beside his Fire Lord.

"I am sorry, Lord Zuko, but the protesters have grown in number and — grown more unruly," he bent his head to report. "Several have been injured in the press since midday." The twin puffs of smoke Zuko exhaled clearly indicated how little he cared for that, and his captain glanced up. "It's unlikely they would dare to storm the palace, and they could not breach the walls besides, but they've become a public nuisance —"

"Get rid of them."

"My Lord?" The captain and Katara both stared at this directive, spoken low and deadly as it was. The noise of the protesters beyond the palace gates ebbed and flowed like a tide in the shocked silence that followed.

"You heard me," Zuko confirmed, in a tone that brooked no argument. "They made a mistake when they threatened my home." He handed Lu Ten off to Katara, who sat the bewildered toddler in her lap and hugged him against her while Zuko stood, imposing in the formal robes of his office. "I want them gone," he repeated, gesturing the captain to his feet. "Gone from the palace. Gone from the caldera. Out of my sight, and my hearing."

The captain hesitated, clearly uncomfortable. "With all due respect, my Lord, it was you who first ruled common citizens should be allowed admittance to the royal city —"

"A _mistake_, clearly," Zuko snapped, and his hands twitched irritably. "We've established I make them. You're a just man, Captain, and good at your job," he continued, switching tacks and gesturing the captain to follow Zuko back the way he came. "Do what you have to…"

"Da?" Lu Ten spoke forlornly, reaching after Zuko when he walked the captain some distance away to impart more detailed instructions. Katara smoothed the prince's thick hair, and whispered, "Your dad loves you very much. He only wants to keep you safe." It wasn't like Zuko to be so impatient with his subjects, she worried. He was a good king, and Katara knew how deeply he cared for his nation and its people. But it was clear the threat of war and violence in the colonies had pushed him to his limits.

She kissed the top of Lu Ten's head, and released the toddler to let him run clumsily to his father when Zuko rejoined them, having sent the captain on his way. His stony expression melted into a subdued smile, and Zuko bent to snatch up the rushing prince and toss him into the air with practiced ease, while Lu Ten shrieked with delight. Zuko caught him handily on descent, and upended the toddler to dangle him giggling upside down, until his dark hair sprung free of its topknot.

He set Lu Ten on his feet then, and knelt beside him to point out a likely clump of bushes for the disheveled young prince to knock about. His son made for this new distraction at his whispered direction, while Zuko took a seat beside Katara again. "You're really good with him," she admired, but Zuko modestly admitted, "Uncle taught me that one."

Katara bit her lower lip before she started, "Zuko —"

"**Don't**," he sighed, slouching where he sat again. "Just — tell me what's new with you, and Aang." He glanced at her with a desperation in his golden eyes quite at odds with such an ordinary request. "_Good_ news," he directed, but somehow, Katara was as taken aback as if he asked her to invent a story off the top of her head.

"We're thinking about having a baby…"

Zuko sat up straighter and blinked once in surprise before Katara quite realized what she said, and blushed miserably. _Stupid_, she berated herself. She hadn't told anyone yet; she and Aang had hardly even talked about it, not seriously.

But she'd been thinking about it a lot lately, the more she saw how lost Aang looked and the disappointment he tried to hide from her, when years passed and his most dedicated acolytes still showed no ability to airbend. And of course, she always wanted be a mother, and Zuko let her hold his son, and she just got too comfortable around him and blurted something like that out…

"That's … great," Zuko managed after a pregnant pause, and gave her a half-hearted smile. "I'm really happy for you."

Her stomach fluttered with what Katara told herself were nerves. "Uh, really?" she spoke slowly, with brows furrowed. "You don't _sound_ happy."

Zuko shifted uncomfortably where he sat, and defended, "No, I mean it. Just — aren't you guys kind of young to be having kids?" At her look of disbelief, he qualified, "Aang's only, what, seventeen?"

Katara couldn't help a wry smile at that. "A _hundred_ and seventeen, actually," she pointed out, even if it was a technicality. "I know he's a bit of a goofball," she leaned back to prop herself on her arms, watching Lu Ten's halting progress after a badgerfrog that eluded his attempts at capture by repeatedly hopping just out of reach. "But he's patient and loving. He'd be a good father."

Seeing Zuko's hesitation, anger flared in her of a sudden and Katara pointed out, "_Look_, I'm the same age **Mai** was when she had Lu Ten —" She stopped at the look on his face, before Zuko glanced down to hide it.

"Hey…" Katara spoke bracingly, laying a hand on his knee. "Everything's okay with you guys, right?" She turned a searching gaze on the reticent firebender. "She came back."

Zuko lifted his head to echo, "She came back," in a tone that made it clear this did not amount to reconciliation. "But…" He drew a deep breath. "I think she would divorce me, if it wasn't for —" He stopped and pressed his lips tightly together, as if in physical pain.

"You don't know —" Katara was quick to reassure him, but Zuko cut her off, gripping his hair in frustration, "She _said_ as much, okay?! Or as **good** as said it…" Katara couldn't think of a word in reply except to ask what happened, and that didn't exactly get her far last time. Zuko admitted as if ashamed, "Sometimes I think — we had kids too soon."

"_Zuko_," Katara murmured in shock, glancing uncomfortably back at the kid in question. But Lu Ten paid them no mind and continued chasing the elusive badgerfrog in circles, spouting angry gibberish when it croaked as if taunting him.

"I _love_ him," Zuko spoke desperately, his good eye streaming tears when he dropped his hands in defeat. "Of course, I love him more than anything, I wouldn't — trade him for anything. But when you bring another life into your relationship, it **changes** everything," he whispered, gaze fixed on Katara as if begging her to understand. "Things you would never think of, until you have a child…"

Zuko drew a shaky breath, propped elbows on his knees to hold his head in his hands. "She wants to leave, I know it. It isn't fair to make her stay, when she doesn't — _love_ —" Katara could only stare, her eyes misting and heart aching for him. Zuko didn't deserve this pain. He continued, "But she would take Lu Ten, and I **can't** lose him. I can't lose any more of my family —"

He stopped when Lu Ten ran stumbling back only to nearly trip into his lap, before Zuko caught him. The toddler reached for the tears that streaked one side of his face, eyes wide and pouting mouth fixed in a little "O" of concern. "Sad?" the little prince asked worriedly.

A broken smile spasmed across his face, crinkling the ridges of his scar before Zuko scooped up Lu Ten to whisper hoarsely, "No. You make me very happy." His short arms hugged Zuko round the neck while the young father rocked him twice, crying, and spoke into his hair, "I love you."

Held close as he was, the prince's piping voice was muffled when he readily replied, "Love you, bye!"

Zuko just cried harder, scarred cheek pressed into his downy hair. And Katara sat still as if frozen in the warm winter sunlight, shock and worry and anger all roiling in her stomach at once. Something was really wrong here. Zuko tried to put a brave face on, but it was clear he expected to lose it all at any moment. His wife, his son, the life he built…

_What happened? What happened? What happened?_ The question blared urgently as the blast of a war horn in her mind, but Katara was not just reluctant to ask anymore. She was afraid. Because shameful and small and selfish as it was, knowing what happened — even **not** knowing, even just thinking about it — forced her to ask herself, _Could it happen to _me_, and Aang? _

_Could it happen to us?_

* * *

Her spoon dropped into the mostly empty bowl with a clatter, before Azula jerked awake at one end of the refectory table, to the tittering giggles of several other novices seated at the other end. Even the oblivious sister at the raised stone pulpit, whose droning recitation of a sacred text had put her to sleep in the first place, paused in her reading a moment. Azula glared down with face burning into her third bowl of _jook_ — and entertained fantasies of setting this pathetic hole in the rock and its every inhabitant on fire.

Azula stood from the bench with as much grace as she could muster when the sister began to read again, and the other novices glanced whispering under cover of the noise at her. She grabbed her tray and deposited it at the counter that opened on the kitchen adjoining the dining hall, made clumsy with repressed rage and the almost total lack of sleep she pushed herself to over the past week.

She still hadn't reached the Spirit World. Tears of frustration pricked her eyes now just thinking about her continued failure, and Azula walked fast from the refectory before anyone else could see, deciding to seek the solitude of the showers.

She was supposed to help clean up after dinner tonight. She didn't care. She hated this place. What had it ever done for her? Azula only came here in the first place to gain access to the Spirit World, and instead she was stuck falling asleep over peasant food to a text she translated by hand at the tender age of nine, for all the good that did her _now_.

The blood of an Avatar flowed through her veins. She had years of experience at meditation, and tried everything she could think of. She had even, embarrassingly enough, actually _asked_ Roku's spirit to help her enter the Spirit World. Out loud. More than once.

Like most spirits in her admittedly limited experience, he of course proved utterly useless. It made Azula feel like she was going crazy again, talking to her hallucinations, even if she still clung to the self-control to ignore her **not** mother's remonstrations that she was looking peaky. She should sleep more, eat more. (Like it was actually possible to eat more.) She had to think of the baby…

Azula stripped off her clothes upon reaching the showers. She flung them on a stone bench set back from the sloped floor and the trough with grate that ran the center of the narrow chamber, lit with green crystals set like crude sconces into the smooth limestone walls. She unbound her breasts and then her braid and kicked her clunky shoes under the bench and tried to remember which of the shower heads along either side she could count on for hot water.

It turned out, tired as she was, that she remembered wrong, and Azula had to huddle shivering under the lukewarm stream until she could adjust her body temperature enough to restore some degree of comfort. Goose bumps still dotted her skin, and glancing the length of her body, Azula began to wonder if the cool water didn't just make her breasts stand up, but her belly too. It didn't actually push out like that all the time now, did it? she wondered, while she soaped and scrubbed and combed fingers through her hair. Azula tried not to think about how much longer she would still be able to look down and see her own feet.

She could **not** still be here by then, she _couldn't_, but it began to look likelier she would, the longer she failed to meet her objective, the more her body and mind and memories and emotions — _hormones_, she firmly dismissed — all conspired to rob her of the concentration she needed, or the mindset, or however the hell one was supposed to go about entering the realm of spirits. It wasn't fair —

Azula stopped that thought right in its tracks. Only idiots like her brother expected life to be fair. That it fundamentally _wasn't_ became less of a problem, when she could make the world and everyone in it bend to her. But it was a new world she sought — or more accurately, one much older, and ordered by rules so foreign as to seem almost nonexistent. If the anecdotal accounts she read were any indication, she may not even be able to bend there.

Azula repressed a shiver. It would only be a temporary handicap, she reminded herself forcefully. The hallucination would be a permanent one, unless she could rid herself of it. If she played her tiles right, she may even stand to gain…

But that possibility lay still in the future, contingent upon her entering the Spirit World. And Azula was too tired and too tired of _thinking_ about it to hope for that at present. Instead, she bent her head back into the lukewarm stream, rinsing her hair straight down her back before slouching her shoulders and leaning her hips forward, running hands over her bump and trying to determine if there was any way she could stand that would hide it.

"So…" a smug voice broke her idle study. Her head snapped erect and hands dropped just in time to witness the stone bench and her discarded clothes with it dart toward one of four novices who stood blocking the door to the hall, at a stamp of her foot.

Azula had a sudden recollection of Ursa chiding, Don't _use your bending to bully other girls!_ before one of her taller, broader companions bent to snatch up the stolen articles when the bench slid to a halt. And the smirking earthbender finally asked Azula, "Who was it?" Another one of the girls standing beside her giggled.

"Give my _clothes_ back," Azula snapped, resisting the urge to cover herself, knowing it would be an admission of weakness and pointless besides. They already saw what she had to hide.

She channeled her anger into wrenching the spigot closed. The last dregs from the shower head dripped to her feet when the tall one holding them argued, "These _aren't_ your clothes, they're the **temple's** clothes." Azula realized too late that she could not remember any of their names. She had never bothered to learn them. "Only seems right to _tell_ head seamstress she'll have to **let** these out, don't you think?" the wheyfaced novice asked her companions.

"That's just what we'll do," the giggler lightly threatened, jade eyes glinting when she nodded toward Azula with arms crossed and long sleeves flowing the length of her dress. "Unless you tell us who got you with child."

Azula went rigid with anger, almost shifting into stance before she remembered she posed as a nonbender here, of necessity. No insult was worth exposing her identity. "You presume too much," she bit out instead, and approached them with head held high and gaze steady.

She noted the younger girl, round-faced and petite, who stood biting her lip one step behind them and silent so far, reluctantly watching the proceedings with a mix of trepidation and frank curiosity. _A hanger-on_, Azula quickly deduced. That one would be the weakest link.

"Give the clothes back," Azula demanded again, thrusting a hand out to glare at them in turn. "**Now**."

Hanger-on looked ready to break, but the braided earthbender spoke up first, with hands propped on her generous hips, "If you won't **indulge** us girls in a bit of gossip, why should we do anything for _you?_"

And as if this had been a signal, the one holding her clothes cried, "Michi, _catch!_" The quiet girl standing nearest the door blanched when the other novice tossed the wadded up dress and tunic at her — and fled with a fearful squeak when Azula lunged for her clothes, realizing a split-second before it happened what they intended. She would **not** be made to hide out naked here until someone else took pity on her —

What Azula hadn't counted on was the other novices standing aside when she gave chase, so her evasive maneuver met with only air, and she stumbled naked and dripping wet out into the crystal-lit hall. If she were not so tired, Azula might have guessed they would set up Michi to take the fall with her — the girl was obviously ignorant of her part in their plans, it clicked a second too late. The more popular novices just as obviously didn't like her either. Neither this realization nor her mumbled apology made Azula any more warmly disposed toward Michi though, when she snatched her clothes back from the girl's shaking hands.

"_What_ is going on here?" rang out a sonorous voice. And their supervising sage approached from the hall that curved toward the kitchens — her round face tanned in its white wimple and lined with severity — trailed by the skinny novice whose grammar Azula corrected. She spoke up now, pointing to Azula in accusation, "It was _her_ I told you about, Headmistress Yina. Walked on kitchen duty without so much's a by-your-leave. And this innit the first time…"

"Skipping chores is the least of her offenses," chimed in the novice who laughed at her before, emerging at Azula's back with the other two to cut off her escape. "As you see."

Azula tried to pivot to keep them all in view — her heart rate accelerated and she felt suddenly surrounded — only to find her bare feet and most of her shins trapped in earthen shackles that sprang up from the floor, while Green Eyes darted forward to yank away the limited concealment of the clothes she held against her. Azula overbalanced in trying to keep hold of them, and threw her hands out with a reflexive gasp to break her fall before Michi rushed to catch her and set her upright. "Are you ok—"

"_Let _go_ of me, you filthy peasant!_" Azula screeched, too incensed to keep from lashing out at the nearest target.

She would have fallen again when Michi let go quickly as if Azula had burned her, if the Earth sage didn't drop her meaty hands at that moment, loosing the bent rock that encased her feet. Azula stumbled instead, caught herself and stood slowly straight, shaking from head to foot and drawing deep, ragged breaths. The barest hint of smoke issued from her clenched fists.

They probably thought she was about to start crying. In actual fact, Azula was just as likely to kill them all right here. These insolent peasants dared accost _her_, a princess of the Fire Nation?

She barely registered the headmistress chiding her tormentor for using earthbending in the halls, before Michi spoke up angrily, "What's _wrong_ with you?" Azula looked around and was mildly surprised to realize the demand was not directed at her for once, but the novice earthbender. Michi quailed a little at the scathing looks the others gave her, but gestured to Azula. "If she fell, she could've **broke** her leg! It might've even hurt her _baby!_"

The Earth sage started with surprise and made as if to speak, her dark eyes fixed on Azula's midsection, as exposed as the rest of her. But the braided earthbender retorted first, "**Some** loss! Like the world needs any more of _her_ sort?"

"It couldn't be more obvious where you come from, colony trash," the jade-eyed novice spoke poisonously. Still holding the pilfered clothes, she walked just out reach around a taut and furious Azula to eye her critically. "Your looks, those eyes… If you've a **drop** of Earth Kingdom blood in you, your _traitor_ of a mother was some **Fire** noble's whore —"

"_Enough!_" Sage Yina hissed, stepping forward to grab the novice's arm even as she glanced the length of the hall, afraid of being overheard. "How have you come to be **pregnant?**" the old woman demanded of Azula as if scandalized, and she barely stopped herself from biting back, _The same way as _any other person_, you utter moron_.

"That's just what _we_ was asking before you came, Headmistress," the novice who first stole her clothes put forward, crossing arms over her flat chest to regard Azula with an ugly smirk. "Maybe she'll be more forthcoming now, tell us how she dishonored her **fine** old name laying with some _stableboy_…"

The novice earthbender scoffed, in disregard of the sour look the headmistress shot her. "This one?" she questioned, with a disparaging jerk of her braided head toward Azula. "_Please_. Like she'd spread her legs for anything less than a high lord —"

"He was."

They stopped at her flat interjection, evidently surprised Azula managed to speak in the face of their slander and humiliations. She lifted her chin to clarify coldly, "The high lord charged with my care. I was fourteen when he had my father _arrested_, and took me as his ward," she further explained, her eyes wide and furious, beginning to sting with the intensity of her glare. Azula hardly knew where she summoned the words from, when abiding hatred still sang along every cord and tendon of her body like one long, undying note, drowning out every other rational thought.

"I lived as a virtual prisoner at a country estate he never used, tended by servants who were strangers to me," she continued, fingers clenched and arms held rigid at her sides, water still dripping to her feet while the dirt peasants stared at her nakedness, or perhaps at her bizarre account. Azula was past caring. "He would have new ones brought in, when I got to know any of them. He would not let me have a friend.

"I was his prisoner, but he never visited me," Azula remembered bitterly. "I think he hated the sight of me. I reminded him of my father, whom he hated. I thought this meant he would leave me alone," she spoke faster, past the tightness in her throat. "If I ran far enough away, he would **forget** me and let me live my life —"

She stopped short, the other novices and the wrinkled sage hanging on her every word. She drew a sharp breath to steady herself and whispered harshly, "_I was wrong_.

"I finally managed my escape through patience and cunning, and the aid of some servants sympathetic to me," Azula lied, for the only help she had in escaping was unintended. "But one of them betrayed me at the last hour, and he met me on my way, cornered me in an abandoned old crofter's cottage…

"My lord was wroth that I should **reject** his kind provision for me," she spoke slowly, stilted at the memory. "My attempts at explanation were more than he deserved, but they only made him angrier. He said that I would learn respect," the words floated to the surface of her mind like refuse dredged up from the deep. "And _suffering_ would be my teacher."

Her mind had cleared enough by this time to note the reactions of those around her. But Azula was too furious to be gratified when she caught them listening with something like the old accustomed fear, as understanding dawned. It couldn't be clearer they found themselves outmatched in trying to bully her.

_You may be a coven of vipers,_ she thought, fire licking the back of her throat. _But I am a dragon._

"What, won't you ask me how it **was?**" she pushed back, pulse pounding in her ears. _If you won't indulge us girls in a bit of gossip_… "He struck me across the face," she told the braided earthbender, and touched her lip where the back of his hand had split it. "He burned my arm," she volunteered, brandishing it at the gaping novice who stood a head taller than Azula, and Michi whose round face shone with tears shed freely as Ty Lee ever did.

"He threw me down so hard, I had a bruise this big," she held her hand up with fingers splayed for the benefit of the skinny novice and the old Earth sage, who flinched as if Azula attacked her, "across my back. I lost my maidenhead in the saddle years ago, training on ostrich horseback," she lied baldly to the jade-eyed novice, who retreated a step at Azula's approach. "But by the end, he still made me **bleed**." She held the other girl's defiant gaze until the novice looked down, scowling and blushing in equal measure.

Azula hugged elbows to her chest and glanced aside to remember, "He held me when it was done, like I was anything to him." She briefly closed her eyes, drew a deep breath and grimaced. "I couldn't run. I sprained my ankle trying to fight." She let down her arms to glare at her inquisitors. "He carried me back to the place I ran from, and locked me away again.

"I saw less of the servants then, but it didn't matter. I had a secret," Azula whispered, laying a hand on the subtle curve of her belly. "One thing he couldn't take from me.

"When he found out," Azula invented, tilting her head, "he called me a lying whore. First **makes** me a whore, then names me one. This is men's idea of justice," she chided the novice earthbender. "This is what they call _right_.

"But I don't need to convince you ladies, do I?" she asked glibly of the jade-eyed novice who still held her stolen clothes, and blushed angrily at the implication. "Why else would you be here, and not home popping out babies for husbands as _thankless_ as they are brainless?" From the tall novice's sudden flinch, Azula knew she struck more than one nerve.

"Why don't you **run?**" Michi asked tearfully, and bit her lip in trepidation when Azula fixed harsh eyes on her. But she persisted, "If he sent you here to have the baby, you still have time. You could run —"

"He has my father," Azula spoke darkly. "I was told he died in prison, but my lord informed me otherwise." Her nostrils flared in resentment when Azula said, "His life depends on my cooperation. For now.

"But one day, I _will_ free him," she promised herself as much as these insolent fools. "And we will take revenge on all our enemies."

Azula didn't wait for them for finish exchanging wide-eyed stares, or gain any satisfaction from how they drew together in unconscious defense when she took a step closer. She demanded of the braided earthbender, "Is your curiosity _satisfied_ —" she fixed the jade-eyed novice with a deadly glare, "— you hateful bitch?"

When they issued no reply besides a closed-lipped glance at each other, Azula thrust out her hand and said tightly, "My clothes."

Green Eyes offered them warily, her hands steadier than Michi's when Azula snatched the stolen articles back. The Earth sage and novices kept staring while Azula threw the dress and open tunic on over her head, looking almost as uncomfortable as she felt. Blood rushed to her cheeks unbidden, and her breath came fast with threatened tears before she decided to leave her smallclothes and shoes where she abandoned them in the showers.

She wasn't going back there, but she did not know any better how to take her leave and in the end, just turned and stalked away, walking as fast as she could without running. Her wet hair soaked through the back of her clothes, the open tunic flapped about her, and her heart beat so loudly in her ears that Azula hardly heard Michi running after her, until she had almost gained the questionable sanctuary of her sleeping cell.

"Wait —" the younger novice tried, reaching for her shoulder before Azula turned on her with a furious, "_What?_" and Michi thought better of it.

"I'm _sorry!_" she wrung her hands to protest. "I didn't know they meant to —" Michi cringed and gestured helplessly to Azula, like she needed reminding.

"And what did you _think_ would happen?" Azula demanded, fingers itching to spit fire. "They would shrug and hand my clothes back when I refused them? That either makes you a **fool**," she spat, "or a liar."

"I'm not like them!"

"No, you're just **stupid** and _weak_ where they're two-faced and cruel! Like one is so much better than the other?" Azula turned to wrench her door open, paused on the threshold and bent her head to speak low, "You had no **right** to ask it." She shot a furious glance over her shoulder. "_No right!_"

"I'm sorry," Michi whispered again, tears shining in eyes round as her dusky face.

Azula thought, _Go die in a fire_. She said, "I don't care." And slammed the door behind her.

It wasn't enough. Her harsh breaths were intolerably loud in the darkened cell. Her eyes burned fiercely but she wouldn't cry, not even here, not even where no one could see her. A scream of frustration burst from her lips instead, and Azula bent fire at the wall until her bedroll curled and shriveled to ash, and the stone was black with soot.

She marched to the green glass window and threw it open, leaning her head out to breathe in the fresh night air depleted by her flames. Azula propped elbows on the windowsill, held her damp head in her hands and glared down into the empty courtyard below, still seething. How they _dared_ demand her secrets, even not knowing who she was…

_You know why_, she told herself. It was the baby. It always came back to that ongoing violation, the unwanted vulnerability of her pregnancy. A weakness which she was increasingly unable to hide.

It was as if in giving up her body to the growing life, Azula gave up any right to her own privacy or even identity. Everyone thought they had a right to her now, to her story. They need only **look** at her to know a man had had her. _Not a man_, Azula corrected herself scornfully, _a __**boy**_. And if _he_ owned her, they must think, why shouldn't they?

"**No one** _owns_ me!" she raged, turning on the empty cell behind to pace it like a caged beast. "_No_ one! No one…" _No one_.

She threw herself down into a lotus position at the center of the cell and squeezed her eyes tightly shut, as she had done so many times before. She was done with this place, with _these people_, but Azula knew perfectly well there was only one way to leave them behind and still claim victory. She was _not getting up from this spot_ until she gained the Spirit World!

It was all well and good to think that, of course, but as much as Azula tried to clear her mind of every distraction, her focus kept getting dragged inexorably back to one single, infuriating thought. _The baby, the baby, the baby_, echoed through her frantic mind like a mantra. _His_ baby. Halfway around the world, and still managed to ruin her life…

"Why are you still here?" Azula spoke at last, and glared down to lay a too-warm hand on her stomach. "Why didn't you die when I almost did?" _If I could will you out of existence, I would_, she thought, and stopped. How did many times did her own mother look at Azula, and probably think the very same thing?

"You'll have **no one**," Azula dragged the painful admission from where she stuffed it down deep inside her, too long ago to remember. "Don't you understand that?" She held her bump in both hands with shoulders slumped. Tears fell on the spun cotton of her tunic when she whispered, "I was strong enough." _Until I wasn't_. "Will _you_ be?"

Azula didn't expect an answer. But neither did she expect the kernel of warmth she felt somewhere under her stomach, the seat of her will, when she turned her thoughts and conflicted emotions and every atom of concentration inward. It wasn't her inner flame. It was — it was…

_Like a heartbeat_.

Azula folded where she sat alone in her burnt and blackened cell, lips stretched tight against the sob that welled up from some half-forgotten part of her. Tears leaked from behind her tight-shut eyes, when she wondered if its heart had even started to beat, would it even be born with a heart _would it even be born_ with ten fingers and ten toes, let alone strong eyes and sturdy legs and sound mind and the fire that was their shared legacy…

"_I don't know why you're here_," Azula whispered haltingly, voice breaking and head bent and tears dripping from her chin. Hands still cradling her barely extant bump in absurd imitation of a maternal instinct she lacked utterly. And even so, the kernel didn't die, the hint of life and heat grew to a pulse that reached to the tips of her fingers and toes with every harsh breath, like a fire stoked.

"I don't why you happened," she brokenly admitted. "I don't know if I have anything to _give_ you, besides just your **life**." Azula pressed lips tightly together, before she could ask, "Will you even thank me for it? Will —" But she stopped when she felt a sick swooping sensation in the pit of her stomach, not unlike when the fight with Zuko at the Western Air Temple blasted her off her airship, and Azula fell spinning down, unsupported by the most basic realities…

The kernel of warmth was gone, she realized with almost as great a shock. Her eyes snapped open — but that wasn't it, not exactly — and Azula lifted her head to behold a vast plain of windswept snow beneath the light of the full moon, broken only by ice-capped peaks in the distance and the fall of waves upon a frozen shore somewhere out of sight.

She felt no chill, not as the steady heat of her inner flame, but the absence of sensation. If she even breathed, no breath fogged the air. And Azula understood.

She was here.

* * *

Mai began to regret agreeing to dinner, around Iroh's third unsuccessful attempt to draw her sullen husband into light, harmless conversation — their having exhausted the limited topics of what Lu Ten got up to today and wasn't the food good, what dish was this anyway?

The Avatar for his part at least tried to assist in lightening the mood. Unflappable cheer may be his secondary superpower, Mai thought, but that wasn't cutting it tonight. He was the bender of all four elements, but no magician, and no effort on his part was going to make them forget the camelephant in the room.

For all her earlier pestering of Mai and Zuko both, it seemed the waterbender had given up her well-meaning interferences for the moment, in favor of glaring vitriol at Mai. The Fire Lady leveled an unblinking stare at her, already knowing who would win that contest. She only had to contemplate how much uglier Katara looked with that pissy expression on her face for a few passing seconds, before the waterbender scowled and glanced to Zuko instead.

Her soft features softened still more in concern, watching him shake his head at a question from Aang about the scarcity of servants in the palace, a fact that prolonged the already tedious gathering. Aang would have done better to ask Mai, who had been forced to reassign palace staff who came in even passing contact with the embittered Fire Lord, in some cases even releasing them on paid vacations to keep the peace.

But Mai didn't volunteer this either, watching Katara watch Zuko run a hand down his haggard face. She wondered if the darling of the Water Tribes even realized she was half in love with him. Or the _idea_ of him.

This wasn't the first time she thought so, watching them together. And for Mai especially, it wasn't hard to see why. Aang wasn't a bad-looking kid, once he put some height on and passed puberty. But even hollow-eyed with sleeplessness and permanently scarred, Zuko was still the most beautiful man she'd ever seen. Mai wondered whether Purity Xue would still make eyes at her husband, if she knew the last woman he fucked…

But even that memory didn't rankle like it usually would, when Mai began to worry that maybe she'd been too harsh with Zuko the last time they argued. He wouldn't stop pushing and she finally lashed out, but even then, Mai hoped to set his priorities straight. Instead, his unhealthy fixation and outbursts of anger had given way to a depression so black it bordered on despair, and she didn't know what to say to him. He wanted to go back and fix the past, when their future looked bleak on more than one count.

She tried to tell him he couldn't change what happened. He was still determined to make amends. She would tell him it wasn't his fault, except some of this was, and Zuko hardly needed more encouragement to blame everyone around him for not seeing and intervening in Azula's abuse. Just like always, he couldn't let go of what **should** be.

_You can't fix the past_, Mai thought at him, when Zuko glanced hopefully to her. _But maybe, with closure_…

Her thoughts drifted again to the mysterious note that had appeared on her writing desk when she returned to her apartments to change for dinner, leaving Mai only time enough to read and burn it, not time enough to investigate. Unsigned and innocuous in its contents, she still recognized the hand from one previous correspondence, and couldn't help but wonder, _Could it really have yielded results so soon?_ The curiosity and dread that warred in her and the unwanted company both pushed Mai to her decision.

She stood from her seat at his right hand, and Zuko's face fell predictably. "You said you would stay for dinner," he reminded, reaching over tentatively to finger the crimson silk of her train. She laid a hand on his back, acutely aware of the silence that fell over the already subdued table, the canny gaze of Iroh seated opposite and the suspicious glare of the waterbender beside her both fixed on Mai.

"I'll only be a few minutes. I want to check on Lu Ten," she lied smoothly, and Zuko nodded. Mai glanced to Katara before bending to press a light kiss to his unscarred cheek. Iroh frowned and Katara fumed silently, but if Zuko suspected her motives, he gave no sign of it, only leaned into her kiss and crept a hand around her waist. Her husband closed his eyes as if savoring even this basic display of affection, and feeling a sudden pang, Mai broke the embrace and walked fast from the dining room, to Zuko's disappointment and the Avatar's renewed attempts at conversation about the progress of his acolytes restoring the Air Temples.

Mai headed for the royal apartments, but when she was some distance from the dining room and out of sight of any guards or servants, ducked down a hidden passage concealed behind a tapestry. After a few more such twists and turns, she emerged into the palace quarters that housed visiting diplomats and foreign dignitaries, and at present, the Fire Nation's ambassador to Omashu. Conveniently enough, a distant relation to her, and called home at the onset of hostilities there.

Tan answered at her softest knock, confirming her suspicion that he dined alone in his quarters. "Lady Mai," her much older kinsman greeted with a practiced flame salute and the barest hint of surprise. "To what do I owe the honor of your presence?"

"I wanted to be sure you were comfortably lodged," Mai said flatly. "I know you have no close relatives left in the Fire Nation." She didn't add, _And a mistress and children left behind in Omashu, to preserve your reputation_. The ambassador, taller than Mai and dusky-skinned as her uncle, gestured her inside with an understated sigh. "Please come in."

Mai was acquainted with his opulent apartments from the first time she came here, in answer to his cryptic note and the warden's advice that she would hear soon from a long-lost relative. She didn't need the grand tour, but turned as soon as he shut the door behind her, to demand, "What news?"

Her graying cousin adjusted the fall of his black ambassador's robes, to remind her with careful forbearance, "My Lady, given the sensitive nature of the communication and the necessity of concealing our involvement, you should not expect a reply. Your Majesty will know when the deed is done, and not before."

Mai stared at him in growing irritation. "If that was the case, why write me at all?"

"I didn't." He blinked, now looking distinctly perturbed. "Where is this note?"

"I _burned_ it," Mai snapped, silently adding, _you idiot_. "It was unsigned, but I recognized your hand."

"What did it say?" he tried instead, a little alarmed, and Mai shook her head as if to throw off a buzzing insect, shrugging in annoyance.

"'Any plans for dinner?'" she quoted flatly, gesturing to the roast duck cooling on his plate upon the table carved with dragons winding up its legs, visible through the rounded arch into the dining room. "You could understand if I had other engagements, being wife to the Fire Lord and host to his idiot friends."

Her kinsman stared. "I wrote that message," he admitted slowly, "to an old friend in the city. I received no reply, but I can't say how it ended up in your hands. Unless this is someone's idea of a practical joke…"

Mai exhaled through her teeth with an angry hiss, and not for the first time, wished for a smarter co-conspirator. Though that had been her wish for most of the time since she stopped working for Azula. _Who would bother, unless they knew our arrangement?_ she thought but didn't say. Let him stew on it awhile, maybe he'd spontaneously generate a few braincells.

She crossed her arms and glanced aside, the flowing sleeves of her royal dress swaying when she turned. "Someone is playing a dangerous game," Mai whispered, and her older cousin said archly behind her, "More dangerous than ours?"

Mai turned to glare at him. "Mine." _Mine is the risk, mine the burden_. "And it's no game. It's deadly serious."

Whatever the ambassador might think of his exalted status, Mai knew she was the bigger fish. _Why would someone want me here, now?_ she wondered, scowling. _To make me implicate myself? To leave Zuko vulnerable?_ Mai tensed before she reminded herself, _If so, their timing is awful. He's only surrounded by three of the world's most powerful benders_.

For the first time since their surprise visit, Mai found herself thankful for the presence of Aang and Katara. But these worries only called freshly to mind her doubts about the whole enterprise. Something about this still didn't feel right…

"Why would she go anywhere near Omashu?" Mai said at last frowning, almost to herself. "After she was captured there once, the whole city would look for her return."

"I cannot speculate as to the princess's motives," Tan told her, just as he had the first time she raised this concern. But he stopped when Mai looked back at him, to add, "Though perhaps it's _my_ motives you doubt."

Her hands moved to her hidden knives in readiness. "I barely knew you until recently," Mai pointed out. "What reason would I have to trust you?" _Besides the lack of any better options?_

"Lady Mai," the ambassador sighed and took a knee before her, bowing his head in submission. "I am your kinsman, and if that were not enough," he looked up, cringed just as uncomfortably as he had when Mai indicated such, "you know my — _circumstances_. I have almost as much to lose as Your Majesty, if Azula's actions or mere presence succeed in reigniting war between the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom.

"Which is why I pray," her older cousin spoke slowly, weighing every word, "you will counsel His Majesty _gently_ when this news breaks. He must be convinced to seek an honorable peace, and not vengeance."

She closed her eyes at the admonishment, and thought again, _Even if you wouldn't thank me_… If Zuko ever learned that she did, what she caused to happen, Mai knew he would call it revenge — or worse. He wouldn't be entirely wrong, but she wasn't just acting for her own sake, but their son's and even Zuko's.

He would never realize what he wanted was impossible, he would never realize what a threat his sister represented, until it was too late. He thought to apologize, make things right with Azula. But Mai knew too well how any such attempt would end. With the father of her child a smoking, twitching heap on the floor. She couldn't let it happen.

Mai held onto the fading memory of those first happy years of their marriage and Lu Ten's infancy, when the princess was still locked away under Iroh's guardianship, out of sight and out of mind. When her name was never spoken in Mai's home, and the only family Zuko had was the one they made, not the one he'd been inflicted with from birth. Ozai would die soon — _Not soon enough_, Mai reflected bitterly — but with Azula, it just never stopped, one thing after another…

"My Lady?" her kinsman asked uncomfortably when the silence stretched, and Mai looked up to see he had climbed to his feet. "Will you consider what I've asked?"

"I'll do what I think best," she coldly replied, and turned to leave. "Look to your own part in this." Tan inclined his head not a little resentfully, but smoothed the irritation from his blandly handsome face when Mai opened the door to the hall and turned back on the threshold. "Thank you for your help," she added grudgingly, "and your discretion. It was very … timely."

His shoulders slumped a bit when her cousin moved to close the door behind her. "We have a mutual interest, Lady Mai." His low tone as much as his posture betrayed the same stress she felt. "And I hope we may mutually benefit."

"I'm glad the accommodations suit," Mai took her leave of him. "Let me know if there's anything else you need."

Mai hesitated on her way past the royal apartments, sorely tempted to look in on Lu Ten as she claimed, even if that meant waking him from his night's sleep. She wanted so badly to hold her son, to remind herself of the necessity of this, when even knowing it did not ease the reflexive hesitation, the persistent hint of unreasoned guilt.

She felt as if she didn't get to see him as often as she ought. Since her estrangement from his father, Lu Ten's days were divided between his parents except at shared mealtimes. Hurt and angry as she still was, Mai did not want to their son to pick up on the tension between her and Zuko. He was such a sensitive boy…

But she would be missed soon, and could not afford the questions. She laid a hand on the bend of paneled wall that led to the royal nursery, and whispered, "There's nothing I wouldn't do to protect you," before she walked away.

Mai re-entered the dining room alongside a royal courier, to find Zuko so upset he barely noted her return. Katara was staring openly and Iroh shook his head silently to himself, when Aang demanded of her husband, "When were you gonna **tell** us this, at his _funeral?_"

"He's not **getting** one!" Zuko snapped unhelpfully. "And it's none of your business what happens to him —"

Mai resumed her seat when the lanky airbender echoed, "None of my business?" He forked a thumb at himself, oblivious as everyone but Mai to the woman courier who took up silent station a respectful distance away from Zuko, waiting acknowledgment. "_I'm_ the one who found a way to spare Ozai! I argued against his execution!"

"He's **not** being executed!" Zuko argued, gripping his hair in frustration. "He got sick, he's dying, that's _it!_" The old general pursed his lips and avoided looking at him, probably thinking of the same omission Mai was. And how the power couple were like to react if they learned.

"But Zuko," Katara spoke up hesitantly from her place beside Mai, "I could _heal_ him. I could at least try."

Her husband looked ready to explode, but Mai demanded for him, "_Why?_"

The waterbender fixed a gaze colder than the arctic wastes she hailed from on Mai. "Because whatever he did or _tried_ to do, he's still a person. A person I could help."

"He's _not_ a person! He's a monster," Zuko darkly denied, and when Katara cringed and made to argue, he clenched fists and shouted, "A **monster!**"

"Why save him? 'Cause he'll go on to do so much _good?_" Mai argued sarcastically, lifting her chopsticks in silent disdain of this conversation, while the waterbender glared ice-daggers at her. "Even **you're** not that deluded."

The teenaged Avatar was beginning to look a little pissed at them both ganging up on his wife. Still he kept his tone admirably level when Aang reached across the table to take Katara's hand in sign of support, and chided them, "Guys, she's just trying to help." He frowned at Mai to add, "And he _did_ do some good. His advice helped save Azula's life —"

Iroh just had time drop his balding head in defeat and Mai to think, _Well shit_, before Zuko snapped, "Don't _talk_ about her!" Aang was taken aback, but had no opportunity to ask before Zuko took to his feet to rail, "He's **never** getting _near_ her again! **Never!**"

Aang held up his hands in attempted placation. "I wasn't suggesting —"

"_What?_" Zuko snapped at the courier who shifted and cleared her throat, though up to now, she had been a model of patience.

The plain young woman took a knee. "My Lord, I am come at the behest of the warden, to report your father's condition —"

"That _thing_ is not my father," Zuko bit out, eyes narrowing.

"— and to relay a request," the courier dutifully recited. Zuko sighed heavily and slumped back into his seat, gesturing for the woman to stand before he laid a hand over his mouth with brow furrowed and eyes downcast, as if bracing himself.

"The drugs the prison is provided are no longer adequate to manage his pain. His mind had begun to deteriorate along with his body, and his doctors request access to certain controlled substances —"

"Wait." She stopped at Zuko's flat interjection. The stares that had been directed at the courier were now directed at him. "You're telling me," Zuko confirmed in disbelief, and let down his hand, "he's going _crazy?_"

The courier looked decidedly uncomfortable, though Mai had to give her credit for lasting even this long. "D-delirious with pain might be a better description, my Lord," she answered slowly. Katara directed a Meaningful Glance at him that Zuko didn't even register, her hand still firmly clutched in Aang's. But with the eyes of the Fire Lord and his esteemed uncle both on her now, the messenger specified, "He has been asking f— for Princess Azula."

"What," Zuko demanded flatly, went rigid. The look on his face was murderous, while Iroh appeared thoughtful.

Perhaps taking this as a demand for explanation, the courier said, "He cries and rages by turns, in one moment threatening the princess, demanding her presence, in the next breath begging she come back, that she remember her father —"

"Stop." The courier fell silent at her Lord's whispered directive, while Zuko sat back in his chair to steeple his fingers and touch them to his forehead. He shook his head with lips pursed, to whisper brokenly, "No more." Iroh watched him sadly, looking graver than Mai had ever seen him do.

The smartly uniformed young woman looked around the table as if for assistance, but Aang was stroking Katara's hand in a comforting gesture, reassuring her in a whisper that if Ozai was that far gone, there was nothing anyone could do for him but ease his pain. Mai gave the courier nothing, knowing fully well as her husband that Ozai deserved to suffer to his last breath.

Mai had to give her points for dedication to her job though, when the woman asked slowly, "If you will not agree to his physicians' request… What should they tell — the prisoner, my Lord?"

"Tell him she's _dead_," Zuko said harshly, his eyes wide and furious, lightly rimmed with red. "She _bled_ out in the hall outside her bedroom, from what he **did** to her." Iroh bent his head with tired eyes downcast, and Mai recalled that Zuko had made him read the medical records too. "Maybe that will _refresh_ his memory."

"Zuko…" Aang put in hesitantly, while Iroh gestured the courier to him with a subtle motion of his hand that Zuko still caught, and scowled at his uncle. "If he's dying, don't you think you should, maybe —"

"Should _what?_"

"I don't know, _talk_ to him?" Aang rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably, while Iroh imparted whispered instructions to the uniformed young woman, who nodded soberly and departed unremarked. "Say goodbye?"

"I have **nothing** to say to him." His voice emerged terse and almost tearful. Zuko clenched fists on the tabletop.

Katara shared a glance with her husband. "Aang doesn't mean for his sake, but _yours_. It might help you to have closure, whatever happened —"

Zuko clammed up visibly, his mismatched eyes darting from Katara to Aang as if he felt cornered. "I don't want to talk about it," he insisted.

Mai watched him silently, her face kept carefully blank. She popped a flaking piece of fish in her mouth to avoid Aang's importunate gaze, though the food tasted like ash by this time. His eyes strayed to the old general —

"Don't _look_ at him!" Zuko practically shouted, bringing his fists down so hard on the table that their mostly empty plates and glasses jumped … along with everyone seated around him. "He knew for **three years **and didn't tell anyone! He's not about to _start_ now — _Are you?_" he snapped at his uncle, who looked back with undisguised hurt.

"Nephew…" Iroh said softly, moving as if to put a hand on his shoulder.

"I've **lost** my appetite." Zuko stood abruptly, shoving his chair back from the table and throwing his napkin down beside his untouched plate, to storm from the room.

Iroh hung his head and laid a hand over his eyes, while Aang patted his shoulder in awkward reassurance. Katara glanced after the departing Fire Lord, before she circled the table to hug the seated general. "He didn't mean —"

"He _did_," Iroh contradicted sadly, letting his hand drop to look up at her when she withdrew, and Aang. "Zuko blames me for keeping silent. He has a right to, it was the wrong choice," the old general admitted, his eyes tearing up. "Even if I did not know what to do, I should have done something, talked to someone." He shook his head. "But it is too late for that now."

He drew a deep breath. "I am leaving tonight, for the colonies."

Mai did not join in their exclamations of "What, **no!**" and "Uncle, you can't take it personally," unsurprised when Iroh held up a hand to silence the two.

"There is nothing more I can do here. Zuko will not take my advice, in council or — or _out_ of it. I have tried **everything** I can think to help him," Iroh said painfully. "It's not enough. I don't know that anyone who was there, who _knew_ her," his tired eyes glanced to Mai, "can help him through this hard time. But maybe," he spoke slowly, looking first to Katara, then Aang, "you will succeed where I have failed."

"Is someone finally gonna tell us what's going on here?" the young Avatar asked him, a little annoyed, and Iroh sighed heavily.

"Zuko recently discovered that — Ozai had abused Azula."

The couple blinked simultaneously, but it was Katara who asked, "He abused her … like he abused _Zuko?_ But she never had a **mark** on her…" _That _you_ saw_, Mai thought coldly.

Iroh seemed almost to withdraw into himself. He considered his words carefully, before he managed, "He abused her — in _every_ possible way."

Mai wasn't surprised the waterbender got it first. "You don't mean —" She blanched at his solemn nod. "Oh my — _Spirits_, that —"

"_What?_" Aang said helplessly, displaying one the few advantages of having been raised by monks. "What happened?" Katara dropped into the empty seat to his left to hiss something into his ear, and her husband blushed like a maid. "No **way!**" he cried, scandalized. "That's _disgusting!_"

"**Azula** told him this?" Katara glanced down the table to ask suspiciously, her implication clear. But Iroh took no offense, merely shook his head.

"Zuko visited his father in prison. It is my understanding they argued, and Ozai admitted his abuse in a moment of anger."

"Did _you_ know about this?" Katara demanded, seeming to remember Mai's presence for the first time, and she sneered. "Yeah, she used to **tell** me all the time how her dad fu—"

"_Stop_ it, both of you!" Iroh snapped, livid. He scowled at Katara to chide, "Mai did not find out until Zuko did. I would never have learned myself, if I did not visit Azula in asylum, and —" he seemed to lose momentum, cringing, "and she did not mistake me for _him_." He shook his balding head at their questioning looks, held up a callused hand to forestall them.

"Please do not ask. It's not something I like to talk about. Or even _think_ about. But it happened," he sadly insisted. "I have had confirmation from independent sources. And it seems now," he added slowly, no doubt remembering the contents, "there is documented evidence of her injuries, though it was never made public."

"Well, I guess…" Katara said at last, looking equal parts thoughtful and uncomfortable. "That — actually explains a lot."

"Explains **what?**" Aang demanded beside her, still horrified. "What are you even — _What?_"

The waterbender arched a brow. "How she acted like she was trying to _seduce_ everybody all the time?" _And wanting to be everyone's _mother_ and lover and best friend all rolled into one is so much better?_ Mai thought but didn't voice aloud.

"Uh, _what?_" Aang said nervously, turning red as a beet from his neck to the crown of his head. "I don't — even know what you're talking about."

"Of course not, Sweetie," Katara consoled, leaning in to hug him. "And that's why I love you."

But Aang glanced aside at Mai, gray eyes wide with shock when he mouthed, _She totally _did! And Mai sighed heavily. This might almost be funny, if it weren't depressingly accurate.

He looked a little less shaken when they broke apart, and managed to ask Iroh, "Uh … _thanks?_ for telling us, but — What exactly do you expect us to **do** with this?"

The old general steepled his fingers where he sat, to volunteer gravely, "**Talk** to Zuko. Get him to talk about it, to _someone_." Mai looked down, suddenly embarrassed. "The knowledge has been like a poison to him ever since he learned," Iroh explained. "Talking is the only way to get it out of his system.

"It won't be easy," he cautioned, arching his brows. "He will resist you, and gods know you won't want to talk about it. _I_ certainly didn't, but — he **needs** this. And if you should find Princess Azula," Iroh added in parting, standing from his chair, "take care how you apprehend her. You will already know not to get too close," he sighed. "But be warned that if you grab her or try to physically restrain her, she may respond … inappropriately."

Aang flushed at the implication. Mai tried to imagine the teenaged airbender reacting the same way Zuko did, and felt a little empty when she couldn't. "You're coming _back_ though, right?" he asked Iroh, and the old general smiled sadly.

"Of course. Zuko or any of you have only to ask, and I will be there," he reassured. "But after so many years away, I feel more at home on the front lines than at court. Perhaps I will be able to do more good there." Iroh took his leave with a flame salute to preempt any more questions, telling them, "Take care, both of you. May Agni light your way."

"And keep your fire in the dark," Aang replied automatically, while Katara managed an awkward, "Thanks, you too."

"Mai…" Iroh stopped beside her seat to take her hand in both his warm, callused ones, with an expression of such grandfatherly concern it made her want to puke. "I wish you could have trusted me enough to help you too. I hope at least you will remember my advice."

"I always do," she flatly replied, ignoring the stares of Aang and Katara. _And I might be likelier to _take_ it, if you didn't look at me like that pushy waterbender does. Like I'm not good enough for him_.

Iroh grimaced as if sensing the train of her thoughts, releasing her hand. "And I hope you have not mistaken my intentions in offering it. I think of you almost as my daughter," he insisted, and Mai couldn't help adding silently, _Just like you think of Azula?_ "Of course I could not be expected to stand idly by, when I see you and Zuko struggling —"

"Of course," Mai echoed with unmistakable finality. "Goodbye, General Iroh."

"Goodbye, my niece-in-law," he told her a little sadly. "Please give Zuko my apologies, and my love."

He exited out the same archway Zuko took, and Mai knew light as he packed — the majority of his luggage was tea leaves and paraphernalia, weighing more in total than his clothes and shoes put together — he would be gone within the half-hour. She wondered why she didn't feel more of a weight lift at his departure, given how strained their interactions became since Zuko betrayed her and Iroh remained ignorant of it, and firmly on his nephew's side.

Conversation was, if possible, even more awkward and stilted after both Zuko and Iroh had left, but Mai stuck around to play the part of hostess and make up for walking out on dinner earlier. Not that Aang and Katara had much to say to her. Or even to each other in front of her, leaving Mai to ponder if her unwanted houseguests even realized the irony. She doubted it right up until they cleared their plates and excused themselves for bed, and Mai was free to leave the servants to clean up and make her way back to the royal apartments.

Mai considered enlisting the help of one of her agents or questioning servants to discover who was responsible for the note in her room, it would have to be done eventually. But her thoughts kept returning to that look on his face, when she kissed his cheek on her way to an invented errand. Zuko wouldn't be asleep yet, Mai thought, probably still pacing a rut in his bedroom floor, fuming over dinner.

She knew exactly what he would say if she tried to talk to him, but… _The knowledge has been like a poison to him ever since he learned. Talking is the only way to get it out of his system_. Mai sighed where she paused before his bedroom door, curiously bereft of royal guards — though likelier than not, Zuko sent them away in a temper. The old man may not be her favorite person right now, but even Mai could admit he might have a point. She turned the heavy latch, and opened the door on the darkness of the Fire Lord's chambers.

"Zuko?" she questioned in a loud whisper, crossing the antechamber to their bedroom proper and the massive canopy bed set upon shallow steps, only to find him already asleep, his arm draped over the side of the bed. Mai sighed when she saw that though he dressed for bed, her husband had thrown the covers off, and she climbed the shallow stair to tuck him in —

Her boot crunched in stepping on the shattered remains of what Mai realized slowly was a teacup. Zuko still didn't wake, and her heart seized with an awful realization. _The tea_, she thought wildly. _The _sedative_ tea_.

_He wouldn't have a taster for the tea_.

There were no spark rocks in the room and no firebending guards outside the door — _no guards, no guards, no guards!_ the words mocked her — Mai ran to the windowscreens instead, wrenching the curtains back in such haste that she tore them down, to flood the room in moonlight.

The sight that greeted her when she raced back to the bed and turned him on his back stopped her breath all over again. An ugly sound caught in her throat, halfway between a sob and a whimper.

His eyes were shadowed. His lips were blue. His chest was still.

He was dead.


	19. A Dragon, Part 2

She wore her black ceremonial armor, edged with gold. Azula stood amid the frozen waste and ran perfectly manicured hands the length of her torso, to discover her youthful body bore no trace of either the starvation attempt or her unwanted pregnancy.

She was fourteen again, proud and invulnerable. Beloved of her father and her nation. Ascendant.

The joy that bloomed in her chest was so unspeakable, she forgot for a moment where she was. Azula thrust a hand out to bend fire, the purest form of expression — before she remembered she couldn't bend in the Spirit World.

She snatched the hand back to her chestplate, grasping her wrist against a sudden swell of disappointment. _That you got here at all is its own kind of victory_, she reminded herself and squeezed her eyes shut. A meaningless gesture, she didn't stop seeing. _More will follow_.

Snow crunched somewhere to her right, and Azula's head snapped around, bangs swaying, to identify the source. Despite the nearness of the sound, the tiny figure clothed in red stood so distant on the moonlit plain that she could not make out its features… Watching her, of that much she was certain.

The speck of color was like a dying ember flung from a fire into the snow. Maybe that was why Azula felt compelled to follow it, when the figure turned and ran into the distance. "Wait!" she cried, starting after it. "Who are you?" What _are you? Why were you watching me?_

Azula chased the only other extant being in sight away from the mountains and nearer to land's end, a sheer drop to the waves that crashed below. Her steel-toed boots kicked up the powdery snow, but left no footprints in her wake when she spared a glance behind.

The snow lay undisturbed by any sign of her passage, but little imprints marked the path of her quarry. That was how Azula knew it was a child, before it even stopped briefly to wave her on. Her arms pumping though no breath misted the air, she drew closer and caught the flash of that white hand, small and delicate as a snowflake at her distance, against the Fire Nation red of tailored pants and a belted tunic. The same sort of clothes she used to wear as a little girl —

Azula stopped when she made out the shoulder spikes though, the pale glint of gold in its topknot. "Who are you?" she whispered this time, drawing her arms close in a defensive gesture, visited by a sudden, nameless fear.

The child must have heard her despite the distance. Her answering giggle — for Azula felt sure now it was a girl — reached the princess as clearly as if it came from right next to her, and not the edges of her sight. Azula was reminded bizarrely of a child Ty Lee.

It shouldn't be possible to hallucinate in the Spirit World, should it? she considered for the first time. This was no vision she'd seen before, but — _New world, new visitations?_ That would be about her luck, she had to acknowledge.

The girl child was off and running again, and Azula, with no better idea where to go and nothing else approaching a landmark to make for, warily followed. The small figure vanished over a shallow rise that, when Azula climbed it, looked down upon a tiered city carved into the frozen cliffs.

_The Northern Water Tribe_. She recognized the multitude of neat canals, ice fountains, shadowed dwellings bent from hard-packed snow and illuminated by a full moon, just as in every illustration she'd ever seen of it. But the valley hidden in a narrower cleft behind the chief's temple was new to her.

She thought she would remember an island of verdant green at the foot of a half-frozen waterfall.

In the moment it took this strange sight to register, the child scampered down a hidden path below her line of sight. But when Azula jogged to the edge of the secret vale, she found the switchback trail down the cliffside deserted, the girl gone from her view. The figure who stepped out from behind the crudely carved _torii_ gate below as if materializing from empty air was an old man, tall and thin and clad in Fire Nation robes. He wore a full white beard and the traditional crown prince's headpiece in his topknot.

Azula knew his face before he even looked up, and anger burned in the pit of a stomach she left behind with the rest of her body, at the temple of the Earth Avatars. So _now_ he decided to show up?

She stared coldly down at the spirit of her ancestor, before descending the path to the valley floor. Azula picked her way carefully down, though she doubted she would suffer any injury if she fell here. If Roku could make her wait days on days for the first thing she ever asked of him, Azula was quite capable of doing the same.

She supposed she underestimated the patience of incorporeal beings though, when the old Avatar merely watched her descent without comment, pale hands clasped serenely before him. Azula crossed the footbridge to the green grass island where he stood, mildly surprised when she drew closer to realize his old eyes were the same color as her mother's, as hers.

She met him beneath the shadow of the _torii_ gate, barely visible by the feeble light of the Moon. "Avatar Roku," she greeted him grudgingly, crossing her arms.

"Princess Azula." He eyed her critically. "You've made a grave mistake."

Contempt turned the corners of her mouth. So that would be the way of it? "Not as grave as _yours_, I'd say," she shot back. "Considering I'm only here on a visitor's pass, and you're here to stay."

Having anticipated an argument or empty threat, she was surprised enough when he actually smiled at this to demand, "_What?_"

"You remind me of someone I knew, that's all," he quietly replied, and Azula arched a brow to volunteer, smirking, "She must have been a great woman."

"He _was_ great," Roku acknowledged a little sadly. "And terrible."

Azula drew the connection he clearly meant her to make. "Is that why you denied me access to the Spirit World until now, because you think I'm like Sozin?" She gestured to herself before demanding, "What changed your mind?"

"Nothing," Roku simply replied, and seeing her incomprehension, added, "It is not for me to admit or deny you. If you were the Avatar, perhaps I could bring you here at will. As you are not, I cannot." He spread his hands.

"Then how did I get here?" Azula asked, and Roku considered her carefully before he replied, "I'm not sure you're ready to know."

She glared at him in challenge. "Let me be the judge of that." For a long moment, the only sound was the rushing of the waterfall behind them, half-hidden by the moonlit copse of bamboo and flowering shrubs at their backs.

Roku closed his eyes briefly in assent. "No amount of meditation would have gained you access to the Spirit World. There is a reason accounts of the Spirit World are so rare. For any mortal besides an Avatar, it is impossible to enter the Spirit World without the direct intervention of a spirit."

Azula felt her heart sink, even disembodied as she was. If that was true, the chances of Ursa being here were vanishingly small. Then she remembered what prompted his explanation. "You're telling me," she clarified, suspicious, "a spirit _brought_ me here? I saw no spirit," Azula insisted, but stopped in the midst of propping hands on her hips at a sudden misgiving, the same feeling she got when someone hidden watched her, waiting…

The unblinking gaze of her dead great-grandfather seemed to see all this and more, when he contradicted, "I think you did."

"The little girl," Azula remembered. And that uncanny feeling grew until she looked around the tiny island, her eyes finally settling on the foliage. Her brow creased. "She — _that_ was no spirit I've ever known or heard of." While most spirits were fantastical creatures, she knew some bore human form. But Azula thought she would recall hearing about a spirit that looked like a young Fire Nation princess. Gods knew that was the sort of story she would've wanted from Ursa, if her mother had ever been inclined to tell her.

Roku raised his eyebrows mildly, but seemed to decide on a different approach. His caution grated, reminding Azula of the therapists at the asylum. But the feeling of being watched outweighed her annoyance, when a silent swaying of the bamboo stalks behind them made her take a step away, closer to the pond shaped like a fat crescent where two black and white koi fish circled each other.

"You tried for some time to get into the Spirit World, didn't you?" the old Avatar prompted, and Azula dropped the stance she reflexively (and uselessly) took to glare at him instead. "What changed?" he urged her. "What is the last thing you remember before coming here?"

Azula scowled, reminded annoyingly of her uncle and his circuitous attempts at imparting wisdom, not that he ever bothered with her. "I was talking — to —" She stopped, an unconscious hand laid on her now-flat stomach. _The baby_, Roku hardly needed her to finish, if he had really been watching this entire time. If she were still in her body, if she still breathed, Azula thought she might start hyperventilating.

A head of dark hair emerged from the flowering shrubs, when the child she chased through the snow stepped out from concealment. Azula's first, absurd impression was that someone had stuck her, Mai, and Zuko in a crucible, and melted them into one somehow smaller person, perhaps four or five years old.

It was the bangs, she realized, cut straight across her brow like Mai's, though they feathered in a way Mai's thick hair never would. Her hair was the same ashy black as Zuko's, as Father's, bound up in a topknot ornamented with the three-point flame headpiece of a blood princess. Her eyes were a gold as pure as her crown, but wider, rounder than Zuko's and hers, shaped like — _my mother's_, Azula thought numbly.

But she could see some of herself in the girl too, the same upturned nose her uncle Iroh would tweak before she was old enough to communicate how much she hated that, the same pointed chin and arch to her brows. Though she was paler than either of the royal siblings, as if she had spent all of her short life locked away indoors —

Her short life, when she hadn't even been born yet… The child studied her back without fear, eager even. She stopped beside the _torii_ gate, half-hugging one of the trunk-like pillars, an uncertain smile playing at the edges of her mouth. How like Zuko she looked, when she smiled that way.

If she were still in her body, Azula thought she would start crying. "This —" She glanced to Roku who watched them impassively, her fists clenched and frozen in place. "This is _not okay_," she squeaked out. Her eyes strayed back to her — to the girl, she couldn't seem to stop looking. "You don't — just get to show me her —"

The child watched her curiously but stayed silent, still hugging the _torii_ gate. "I didn't bring you here," the spirit of her ancestor reminded patiently. "_You_ did." She looked to him in irritation, when he distinctly **said** — "She did." And Azula stopped, stared.

"Your spirit was in the physical world, hers is in the Spirit World. Still, you share one life, one body, so long as she is in you. That is a more powerful connection than you share with me, whom you have never met, or with any other spirit. When you opened yourself to her, the combination of that openness and your will to enter accomplished your entry to the Spirit World.

"Your bloodlines and placement at the temple might also have something to do with it," he added, frowning, though Azula barely heard him when her — when the child detached itself from the _torii_ gate to approach her. "I don't know that this has ever happened before, certainly not as long as I have been here."

But he stopped when the girl child stopped beside Azula, reaching up to pluck the three-point flame headpiece from her topknot and hold this wordlessly out to her. Azula took it from her hands on reflex, and said in answer to her unspoken question, "This is the crown of a princess of the Fire Nation." Her manicured hands shook when she replaced the golden flame in her daughter's hair, only to withdraw them and whisper, "_You_ are a princess of the Fire Nation." _Like me_.

The child glanced to the identical flame in Azula's topknot then back to her face. "It —" Azula looked to Roku again, lips pressed tightly together and too scared to ask the most pressing question on her mind. "It's a girl?"

"That much seems likely," he cautiously replied, looking on the child as if he expected her to spontaneously combust. But all Azula heard was what he _didn't_ say.

The question flew from her mouth before she could stop it, "Will she look like this?" Azula was painfully aware that her own image here did not reflect her reality. She pulled her nearer hand away instinctively when the child made to hold it, then remembered her own mother doing the same, and assented. _I don't like to be touched_, she thought helplessly. If she could get accustomed to it, like with Ty Lee — But would she have that chance? Would her d— Would the girl?

"Will —" Azula tried, while the child prised her fingers apart, comparing them to hers. With her dark head bent over Azula's hand, she seemed fascinated by the contrast of her long, sharp nails to the girl's own, trimmed short. Azula had to look back at Roku, who stood unmoving in the silver light of the Moon, before she could ask it.

"Will she be born — _whole_, and healthy?"

His aspect grew harsher, eyes narrowed. "I may be able to look into the world, but I cannot look into your womb," Roku coldly denied. "No one can know what she will **do** or be, until you bring her forth."

But Azula glared at a sudden realization, when she had been too angry to question or care what he meant before. "When you said, I made a grave mistake…" she whispered harshly, while her daughter fisted small fingers experimentally in the flare of Azula's sleeve above her red leather bracer. "You meant —"

His level gaze, his silence, were all the answer Azula needed. "How dare you?" she spoke low and deadly. The child seemed to pick up on her sentiment, frowning at Roku with the same crease between her brows that Azula saw when her father yelled. "You **just said** no one can know what she'll do or be!

"Her being my daughter — the way she was _made_ — none of it means she'll be — she'll be —" _A monster_, "— like **me!**" Azula spoke in anger, the grip of the girl on her arm her only restraint from showing Roku exactly how she felt about his presumption, divorced from her body or not.

"And **I** made a mistake?" She gestured sharply to herself with her free hand, when the implication insulted her all over again. "_I made?_ If you've really been watching, _you know_ who her father is! You know what he **did!**"

Her dead ancestor grimaced and turned his face away, confirming her suspicion. Azula wasn't pacified. His silence wasn't enough, it would never be enough. "This is _just_ as much his **fault** as mine!" she insisted. "But no one blames him, no one **ever** blames him! All he ever _gets_ are chances, and never any left for **me!**"

The child tugged at her shoulder guard at that moment, and Azula slapped her hand away to snap, "_Stop that!_" She darted back behind the _torii_ gate to glare daggers at Azula, but not before her tongue darted from her mouth.

"Did she just _stick her tongue out_ _at me?_" Azula demanded, incensed. "Who **taught** her that?"

Roku held up his hands in a placating gesture, but she could see him fighting the urge to — "No one _gave_ you permission to **laugh!**" she chided, and the old Avatar sobered accordingly.

The girl kicked at a dark tuft of grass, sullenly with hands clasped behind her back, before she sneaked a glance up at Azula. Watching her, the pang of recognition was yet one more thing Azula felt in the absence of more familiar sensations. She would have sighed if she still breathed, but asked Roku instead, "Will she remember any of this?"

"No," her dead ancestor readily replied, hands tucked into his flowing sleeves. "She is a new spirit. She will have no memory of the time before she lived, just as reincarnated spirits have no memory of their time between lives." His brow creased at the skeptical look she shot him, but Roku continued, "I know what you seek, but I have no more knowledge of your mother's whereabouts than you do.

"Besides your brother and yourself, Ursa was my last living descendant," he sadly disclosed. "I tried to watch over her, especially in her banishment. Though there was little I could do, with my current incarnation gone from the world. And my attention was … _divided_, when she vanished from the Earth Kingdom village where she had lived for some years in obscurity. I could not tell you what happened to her or even if she is here."

Azula crossed arms and considered this, while the child looked back and forth between them. "You're a pretty shitty ancestor, you know that?" she spoke glibly at last, tilting her head with a quick glance at her daughter. "And if anyone's qualified to make that judgment, it's me."

His long face curdled like spilt milk, and seeing his upset, the child smirked so broadly dimples dotted her cheeks. Azula felt like a mother for perhaps the first time.

"You know now who I am," Roku said severely, brows furrowed. "Would you still have slain the Avatar under Ba Sing Se, if you knew it meant my end?"

"Of course." Azula shrugged disdainfully. "He was an immediate threat, needing decisive action. Your afterlife weighed against my continued existence and the success of our campaign? That would be no choice at all."

The old Avatar looked on her in disappointment, but appeared unsurprised. "And do you suppose that makes you —" he paused, scowling as he searched for a politer term, "— a _bad_ descendant?"

"Only if **I** assumed some obligation to _you_," Azula pointed out, and arched a brow in impatience at his game. "I don't think it works that way."

"No, I suppose you wouldn't," Roku said. "But will you admit obligation to anyone? Even _her?_" He nodded to the small girl who stood holding her own elbow on the other side of the _torii_ gate from Azula, and the princess glared hatred at him. This blowhard could beat her uncle for a pointless lecture.

"You seek power but deny obligation to anyone besides yourself," Roku admonished, clearly expert on her motives when they had never spoken… "Power not checked by responsibility brings only destruction. Responsibility without power to act leads to stagnation. Both are needed to achieve balance. Push and pull." He glanced to the koi fish circling in the pond behind her. "Yin and yang. You … and Zuko."

Azula clenched fists, fuming at the suggestion, but Roku ignored her. "I do not have to guess what you intend for him," the old Avatar hinted darkly. "But do not let your intentions or this sordid history blind you to **fact**. You are _both_ necessary to each other, to your family, and to your nation.

"The same conflict that was born in him, lives in _you_." He pointed to Azula. "With or with_out_ him, it would still live in you. To deny this part of yourself brings imbalance, the source of your madness. You must accept that good and evil are at war inside you," he urged. "It is your nature, your legacy —"

"No," Azula denied, "it's **your** legacy." She glanced to the girl, still watching, silent, and lifted her chin. "My legacy, is _mine_ to make."

She knew a moment's satisfaction at his stricken look, before it gave way to outright alarm and Roku barreled past her to the koi pond. Azula stepped quickly out of his way, her objection forgotten when the white orb of the Moon was plunged in red and the vault of the sky and earth below with it. Stars winked out above them and fell as ash amid the dying light, too quickly even to track, and where they fell, the black spots spread. Holes eaten in painted silk, thrown on a fire that burned without light —

_But it's a painting of your _family, Ty Lee spoke in her memory, and her brother demanded, _You think I care?_

Roku splashed to his knees in the pond in the falling dark, to lift the white koi fish from where it floated lifeless. The water dripping from it fell without ripple back into the pond, its surface black and still as a pane of glass. He turned toward her, his eyes lit from within and his mouth — His mouth formed a question but it died with the light before it could reach her.

And all Azula knew was the same bone-deep terror she saw in the child's face when they ran to each other, drawn by an instinct as old as the world. Her daughter screamed a word, a _name_, that cut her to the core across the silence neither one could bridge.

Azula almost reached her, the fingers of their outstretched hands just touched beneath the arch of the _torii_ gate, before darkness swallowed them both.

* * *

A shrill animal screech was their only warning, when imperial firebenders burst in the door to Aang's and her chambers. Katara leapt out of bed and snatched up her waterskin on reflex. Momo jumped off Aang's chest, when her husband took to his feet across the wide expanse of their silk-hung canopy bed.

"Avatar Aang, Master Katara!" the lead guard greeted them hastily, his smooth face the only one of a half-dozen left exposed by his helmet. "The Fire Lord needs your help, please come with us!"

Aang nodded worriedly, grabbing his glider staff to follow them through the richly appointed antechamber. "What happened?" he found the presence of mind to ask, despite Momo climbing up his shoulders to tug on his ears and chatter urgently, the fur on his back standing up.

"Rioters have forced their way into the palace," another one of the guards spoke over the first, his voice muffled by the three-eyed helm he wore. "We must hurry," another urged them out into the hall. But a vague doubt lurked half-formed at the back of her mind, before Katara remembered meeting Zuko in the garden, their talk interrupted by —

"Where's your captain?" she demanded, slinging the waterskin over her shoulder and bringing up the rear. You never saw their faces, she remembered, except for the captain of his household guards…

"With His Majesty," the lead guard dismissed tersely, waving them forward down the hall, lined on both sides with slender pillars of black marble, veined with gold that caught the lamplight. "As _you_ should be."

Katara was about to take issue with his tone, when a desperate firefight spilled into an intersection of two halls near them. "What —" she started, but the fire blasts and shouts exchanged nearly drowned out Aang, when he ran for the combatants down the hall, yelling and waving his arms. "**Stop!** What are you _doing?_"

And she realized. They _all_ wore the uniform of imperial firebenders.

"_Aang!_" she shouted a warning, whipping the water from her waterskin to knock back a guard beside her who moved to bend fire at Katara. Her husband whirled and spun his glider staff to disperse another blast aimed at his back, while Momo jumped on the guard with the open-faced helm, pulling it down over his eyes to glide away.

Katara split the stream with a swift parting of her arms, one elbow locked over her head, the other leading to spin another guard off his feet with a muffled cry of alarm. The flames he bent at her hit the stumbling "captain" instead. He collapsed screaming and clutching his face, while Aang's demand for explanation was cut short, when he had to duck a concussive burst of fire one guard kicked at him.

Aang swiped a low arc of bent air with the staff to break his root, and the guard fell with a crack to the head that said he wouldn't get up soon, helmet or not, thanks to a timely sheet of ice Katara bent under him —

The moment's distraction cost her, when the stocky firebender she first repelled grabbed her from behind, twisting her arms behind her back and planting a foot between both of hers to prevent her breaking free. She cursed her lapse of attention, the enclosed space where they were forced to fight. The arched ceiling may be high, but the paneled hall was narrow by comparison and offered little in the way of cover. And with no ready source of water besides her meager skin, she could not bring her element fully to bear.

"_Katara!_" Aang set his feet and earthbent the tiled floor from under her captor while she tried to twist free, but not before the guard head-butted her so hard Katara saw double. He yelled his shock a split second later when Aang pinned him to the ceiling with a column of rock bent up from the floor — and dropped a short rod with pronged end that he had produced from concealment.

Katara dropped to hands and knees with her head splitting and arms singed through her cloth bracers, but still managed to call the water to her. When Aang ran to help her up, it was he who had to drop flat to avoid the water arms she bent at a guard who tried to ambush Aang, dousing the flames. She compacted the water to sweep that imperial firebender into another just climbing to his feet, and they collided in a tangle of armored limbs and muffled cries.

Aang pulled her up amid the weak moans of their burned opponent, before the hissing of an angry lemur grabbed their attention. Momo harassed the last guard standing, biting futilely at the gloved hand that snatched up the glider staff from where Aang had dropped it.

"Momo!" Aang cried in alarm, running to him while Momo had to dodge a fire blast from the guard, screeching. The lemur tugged at his spiked heel to trip him instead, and Aang trapped his feet in earthen shackles before the guard could deliver the kick he aimed at Momo. But the water whip Katara bent at the same time only broke Aang's glider to splintered halves, when the firebender used it to block her attack. He still toppled with an audible snap of his trapped legs, and an agonized scream cut short when he passed out from the pain.

"To _me!_" Aang yelled with hand outstretched, looking sickened at the turn their fight had taken. But Momo darted aside the airbender, screeching a warning too late to guard Aang against the twin thrusts of the last two imperial firebenders, who regained their feet to strike at him from behind.

Katara screamed, convinced for a second they had speared him. Until Aang jolted, his muscles locked, he fell to one knee with a sharp cry of pain — and she saw the guards wielded the same sort of rod their companion dropped earlier, double-pronged at one end and sparking with electricity. _Cattle-prods_, she realized quickly. Katara had seen these used at some of the better-off ranches in the Fire Nation countryside when they traveled in disguise, but never to such devastating effect.

She yelled her outrage when one of the guards stuck Aang again, whipping the implement from his hand but forced to dodge his retaliatory blast of fire, until she could bend the water into a hasty shield. Aang collapsed on his side with tears in his eyes from the pain of the blow, and a cry on his lips that tore at her heart.

It was Momo who attacked the guard that moved to finish Aang with daggers of flame, while Katara was occupied blocking fire from the guard she disarmed. The lemur flapped up into his face, latching onto his helmet to dart deft fingers into his eyeholes. But his protective _hiss_ turned to a screech of pain, when the flailing guard clipped Momo's tail with one of his fire daggers.

"_No!_" Aang choked out, struggling up. Aang managed to knock the guard away from a fleeing Momo with a hastily bent blast of air — but not before his gout of flame engulfed the lemur, too quickly even for Momo to scream.

"**NO!**" Aang pushed to his feet. His eyes and tattoos flashed white when he spun with elbows locked, bringing his arm overhead in a sharp chop. His hurt and anger unleashed an arc of flame, with an airbending slice that dented the guard's armor through his fire shield, throwing him back into a pillar so hard that it buckled on impact, where he fell to lie unmoving.

Katara moved to cover a trembling Aang, her arms encased in bent water though her eyes blurred with tears. But the last imperial firebender hardly spared a moment to retrieve his weapon, before he turned and ran away from the firefight that sparked this ambush, just winding down across the long stretch of hall. Most of the combatants lay injured or unconscious or worse, but a few of those remaining jogged their way, gloved hands lifted as if to hail them. Katara bent the water back into the skin at her hip.

"_Momo_…" Aang whispered, his voice thick with grief when he bent to lift the small body, heartbreakingly still and burnt beyond recognition, and cradle it against his chest.

"Aang," Katara spoke urgently and touched his shoulder, nodding to the imperial firebenders who approached them. Aang scowled and tucked Momo inside his shirt. He dropped quickly into a horse stance and thrust his hand palm-out to push them back down the hall on a rolling slab of tiled floor, bending the rock wall to the practical limits of his range, despite shouts of pain and surprise from the dogpiled firebenders.

"They all **look** alike!" Aang burst out in frustration at her shocked glance. "We can't even tell whose side they're on! If they would _do_ this —" He stopped in cradling the lump buried under his shirt, blanching at the same moment as Katara.

"**Appa!**" Aang cried desperately, turning to make for the stables where they left him. "We have to find —"

"_Zuko_," Katara insisted, grabbing his arm to detain him, her heart in her throat. "If his guards turned on each other —"

His eyes went round with shock. "They turned on him _first!_" Aang bit his lip for the briefest of moments, probably weighing the risks. But Appa was possessed of superhuman strength and near-human intelligence, and he could fly besides. If he could escape the royal stables, he should be fine, but Zuko — They both knew Zuko hadn't been at his best lately.

Aang grabbed her hand, holding Momo under his shirt with the other and sprinting the length of hall he tore up with his inexpert earthbending. They encountered only one more tangle of imperial firebenders down a side hall, too absorbed in their fighting to notice when Aang and Katara passed them. It was a mark of how serious the situation was that Aang didn't stop to intervene but kept on toward the royal apartments, shoving past some palace servants fleeing the other way down the hall, ignoring others peering scared out of doorways as they ran past.

They had just turned the corner on a peristyle, hung with curtains of diaphanous crimson like long streaks of blood and opening onto a flowering courtyard, when the lights cut out without warning. The frightened screams from nearer and more distant wings of the palace alike chilled Katara. But not half so much as the sight that greeted them in the light of the half-moon.

Mai stumbled under the weight of the body she had hoisted by an arm over her shoulders. Her knees hit the carpet, a despairing cry burst from her lips when she dropped Zuko beside her. Mai jumped to her feet with desperate energy, dragging him by his arms instead, crying, panicking when she couldn't move fast enough and pulled too hard to fall again, on her bottom this time. She only spotted Aang and Katara when they were nearly upon her, her crown missing and shining hair in disarray, her narrow eyes bloodshot and half-crazed.

Zuko lay on his back, arms thrown over his head where Mai dropped them. His lips were bluer than they should look even in moonlight, his face gray. Katara realized with a jolt that _he wasn't breathing_.

"_Help him_," Mai begged, low voice cracking. Aang dropped to his knees beside Zuko, more out of shock than anything, while Katara bent the water from her skin, eyes burning, head splitting, heart racing. Oh Spirits no, not him —

"Oh _no_," Aang echoed her thoughts, horrified. His looked quickly to Mai, sat opposite him. "What happened?"

"_Poison_," she gasped, couldn't seem to catch her breath between the exertion of dragging him and threatened tears. "In his tea — he drinks to sleep. _He doesn't have a taster for the tea_ —" Mai clapped a hand over her mouth, too late to catch the sob that spilled from it.

But Katara couldn't spare more than a glance for her, when she dropped down beside Aang, beside Zuko to heal him. The water that encased her hands lit a bright cerulean blue, fed by her _chi_ when Katara pressed it quickly to his bare chest. She didn't know where to start, didn't know what poisoned him or even what it did, but if she could locate the damage, maybe —

The glow died, and her water splashed uselessly over his chest and loose sleeping vest at the frantic glance she exchanged with Aang. He was taking Zuko's pulse, and one look at his face told her he had reached the same awful conclusion.

"What is it?" Mai demanded with knees hugged to her chest. She sat up, hands braced against the crimson carpet. "Why isn't it working?"

"Waterbending uses a person's own _chi_ to heal them," Aang spoke haltingly, while in desperation, Katara called the water back to her hands and infused it with her own energy again. But he was right, when she tried to reach inside — There was nothing, no response. She bent the water back into her skin out of habit, to whisper tearfully, "His _chi_ is gone."

Mai blinked incomprehension and looked quickly between them before Katara even remembered she wasn't a bender, and likely didn't know the significance. "Then — **revive** him!" Mai thrust a hand at Zuko in mounting frustration. "You're an _airbender!_" she pressed Aang. "Make him breathe!"

"Mai," Aang spoke painfully, voice catching and tears in his eyes, "his heart stopped."

Katara couldn't help shrinking from the wild look Mai fixed on her, when she sat forward on her knees to demand, "You're a bloodbender. Make it _beat!_"

Katara didn't ask how she knew, when _Zuko_ hadn't even joined them then. She didn't voice her unspoken promise never to bloodbend again, when she knew she would do it and worse, to save his life. It might even have worked, if —

"It's not a full moon," Katara choked out, her heart breaking all over again when Aang slumped, recalling the same limitation. "I can't —"

"He'll **die** if you don't!"

"He's _already dead!_" her voice broke.

"Only if you don't **help** him!" Mai argued, back bent as if she were crushed beneath the same immeasurable weight. "It's not too late, it _can't_ be too late! It can't — I _can't_ —" She hid her face in white hands, and a low whine issued from behind them, like the sound of a wounded animal.

"He saved both our lives," Aang took Katara's hand to implore her. "We have to try."

She sucked in a shaky breath while Aang jumped to his feet at her tacit agreement. Katara bent her wrists and splayed her fingers just over his chest, the way she remembered seeing Hama do, the way she did four years ago to stop a madwoman from killing her friends. The stakes were just as high now as then, but it wasn't a full moon. His chest began a slow rise and fall at the repetitive movements and controlled breathing of Aang just behind her, but Katara sensed more than saw this, every ounce of concentration on the blood in his veins, willing it to flow. On his kind heart, willing it to beat…

His limbs didn't so much as twitch. The effects of bloodbending were so violent, Katara didn't know if such fine control was possible even with a full moon _it wasn't a full moon_ and Aang breathing for him wouldn't help if she couldn't get his heart to start —

She couldn't get his heart to start. Her own breath grew quicker, sweat beaded her brow the harder she worked her fingers and hands, trying what little she had seen and everything she could think of, growing more desperate with every breath she drew and Zuko _didn't_. She couldn't bend his blood and her eyes kept returning to the starburst scar just below his chest that began to blur from focus, from the lightning bolt he took for her and all she could think was, _Where were you when he needed you? Useless, helpless, _weak…

She couldn't get his heart to start.

Her shoulders slumped and hands dropped to his chest on his next exhalation. Her fingers curled as if to hold him there, her eyes fixed on his still face to commit it to memory. Seeing her failure, even Aang stopped and Mai just cried harder. Her failure, her fault, she couldn't get his heart to start…

Zuko, who chased them half-way around the world, who helped chase down her mother's killer. Zuko, who made dumb jokes that no one got and served them tea at his uncle's shop, who taught his son to feed turtleducks.

Her friend.

Katara dredged the words up from some dark part of her, deeper than the light of hope could reach. It was the hardest thing she ever had to do to admit, "_He's gone_."

* * *

He woke to the golden light of afternoon, spring grass at his fingertips, his head laid in his mother's lap.

"_Mom?_" Zuko questioned, his voice emerging higher, younger than he seemed to remember it. Ursa watched him, softly smiling, her face framed by the boughs of their favorite tree, below which they would sit to feed the turtleducks. "What happened?"

She brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, with eyes shining. "My sweet prince," her voice was somehow richer, with love, with regret, than he had ever heard it. "You fell asleep."

He blinked at this, made anxious for no reason he could say, and sat up to ask her, "How long'd I sleep?" Ursa opened her mouth to reply, still smiling, when a harsh rebuke interrupted her, "_Again_."

His stomach clenched reflexively, and Zuko knew who spoke before he even looked up across the turtleduck pond. Its surface was a series of continuously overlapping circles, rippling as if struck by invisible raindrops. On a higher bend of rocky shore beside the willow tree, his eight year old sister picked herself up off the grass, jumping hastily to her feet when their dad bent fire at her in impatience. He struck an imposing figure in the robes and mantle of the Fire Lord.

Azula deflected the flames without complaint, then stepped back from Ozai and dropped her arms. She ducked into a shallow crouch to sweep her hands first right, then to either side, and bring them in to her core. Her hands parted when she lunged right, legs trembling with the awkward stance before she kicked left, blue flames bent from her foot and outstretched hand, still blooming when she hopped right again to land on bent knee. Her outstretched arm shook with the strain of the otherwise steady stream of fire she blasted across the stones and into the water.

Azula spun on one heel and almost lost her footing before she recovered, trailing fire that she lobbed at the grass around her. Somehow the fireballs didn't catch, proving only a prelude to the arc of flame she whirled overhead and bent in a circle. She ran to their father, the blue spiral of her fire following her outstretched left hand like a brilliant streamer, coalescing when she stooped to draw the flames together into a fireball bigger than her head, dissipating harmlessly when she jumped to kick fire at their dad instead —

Ozai grabbed her foot, plucking her out of the air to drop Azula on her back with a pained _oof!_ when the wind was knocked out of her. "Mom…" Zuko said uncomfortably, standing though he hardly knew what he could do about it.

Ursa watched them, frowning delicately, but turned a reassuring smile on Zuko. There was something hard about it that made him uneasy. "Don't mind her, darling," she dismissed, while Dad shouted down at a cringing Azula, "How have you gotten _worse?_" Even Zuko could tell she'd just been training too long…

"One day she'll learn, her place as your sister is to support you in everything," his mother soothed, smoothing a wrinkle from his pantsleg. "Not to upstage you in front of your father."

Azula half-sat up to gasp in protest, "I didn—" but Ozai slammed her back into the ground with an elbow to the chest. "_Silence!_ Your breath is for **bending**, not making excuses," he hissed poisonously, bent over her. "If you don't know how to use a thing, it will be _denied_ to you. Do you understand?" Azula nodded mutely, tears springing to her eyes before he shoved her down to climb to his feet, and she scrambled to do the same.

"Ozai indulges her habits now, but she can never succeed him." His mother stood to hug Zuko to her side. "Just wait," Ursa whispered, and glanced to them again with eyes narrowed, intent. "The _world_ will curb her soon enough, even if he doesn't."

Zuko blinked up at her in astonishment. Did she even see what just hap—

"What are you looking at?" Ozai demanded, and Zuko only realized when Azula jumped guiltily that she had been looking to _him_. Mom moved as if to hold him back when Zuko walked to the edge of the pond, her name on the tip of his tongue. But Dad gripped the back of her neck, and Azula seemed almost to freeze in place.

"Do you think to show your _mother_ what you've learned?" their father asked Azula softly. "Do you think that she would praise and pet you, like her precious **son?**"

"No, Father," Azula answered with shoulders slumped. "I know she wouldn't."

Ozai knelt on one knee beside her. He took her chin in his hand and turned her face away and kissed her cheek. "Why _wouldn't_ she?"

"Because —" Azula spoke almost too low to make out, "She doesn't love me."

"No…" Zuko whispered, horrified, unremarked by either of them. "That's not true! Mom, tell her it's not —" he turned to entreat her.

But Ursa was gone. Gone from beneath their tree, from the garden, from the palace, as if she'd never been.

"Why doesn't she love you?" Dad pressed a kiss to her forehead, and Azula answered readily, with growing heat, "Because she's **weak**. She _fears_ me. She fears what I can do."

Father turned her face back to Zuko. "Why does she love your _brother?_" he breathed the question into her ear, and sealed it with another kiss. His cruel eyes fixed on Zuko though, taunting, daring him to interfere.

"Because he's _weak_ like her!" his little sister bit out, glaring hatred at Zuko when moments ago, her eyes drew him in. "Because he's a **boy**, she thinks he'll inherit. She trusts him to protect her, but trust is for _fools!_"

"Who loves you, Azula?" Dad lightly demanded, steering her chin back to him, and with it, her full attention. She laid both hands on the black mantle of his shoulders, her words rang with an awful intentness, "Only you."

Ozai thumbed her lips, his gaze fixed on hers. "Who do you love?" She pressed her forehead to his, her eyes squeezed shut as if in physical pain. Her voice sounded a thousand years old, "_Only you_."

He kissed her on the mouth then, long and deeply, in a way no father should ever kiss his daughter. "_Stop it!_" Zuko burst out, angry and scared and disgusted all at once. He broke into a stumbling run around the turtleduck pond, though what he would do when he reached them, he didn't know. "Don't **touch** her!"

His lip curled with contempt before Ozai even broke from her. Zuko took a swing at him, half-blinded by tears, but his dad stood quickly to avoid it, grabbing Zuko's phoenix tail to prevent him landing a blow. "Wait your turn, boy," Ozai wrenched his neck back, and bent his own head to sneer, "Didn't your _mother_ teach you any manners?"

Azula snickered off to the side, and Zuko shot her a glance in reproach _wasn't she going to help him?_ But his hands stilled in prying loose his father's grip, when Zuko caught blood on her mouth —

A second glance dispelled his first horrifying impression. She was wearing makeup, her lips painted and eyes lined with kohl and older than the last time he looked — She grew up while he wasn't looking…

"'Zula, _don't!_" he yelled, his own voice telling Zuko this same revelation aged him too. Ozai pushed his head down, forcing Zuko to his knees, but his eyes fixed on the sister looking down on him. "_Don't_ let him change you! You don't have to be what he **wants!**"

"Why?" Azula stepped closer, head tilted in question. "Should I be what _you_ want? Would you use me more kindly?"

"How can you _defend_ him?" Zuko raged, when she crouched calmly opposite him in the late sun, to watch him struggle. "What he **did** to you — You shouldn't even _love him!_"

"I should love _you_."

"Exac—" He stopped himself and glared at the cold smile that flashed across her face, too cruel, too knowing, for a girl of eleven years. "Why?" she demanded a second time. "What have you ever done for me?"

"I was your **brother!**" Zuko cried in disbelief, pulling in vain against his father's grip, cast in his shadow while Ozai sneered at him, and Azula just replied, "When it suited you.

"When I used to follow you around like a little lost turtleduck, aping your every petty achievement — I suppose you were my brother. And when I _surpassed_ you," she spoke low, poisonously, standing from her crouch, "were you my brother **then?** When I lost _everything_, were you my brother then?

"When I asked you for my **freedom**," his sister bit out, teeth bared and eyes snapping like flames and altogether more accusing than he could stand, "_were you my brother then?_"

"I know I made some mistakes!" Zuko choked out, even if he couldn't grasp exactly what those were right now. Even if his chest grew tight with panic when he tried. "I just want to set things right! I w— I want us to be a family again."

"You're too late," she flatly dismissed him, arms crossed over her chest. "I _don't_."

"No," Zuko spoke quickly, cut by her rejection. He could practically feel Ozai smirking over his shoulder. "You said that before, when really — you needed me.

"I left you alone once when you needed me," he remembered with regret. "I'll _never_ leave you alone again!"

She pressed lips tightly together, considering him, brows drawn and more vulnerable than she had ever looked at that age. But it was Ozai who bent to hiss, "That choice doesn't _belong_ to you anymore. Go now, Azula!" he glanced up to urge her. "**Take** what is yours!"

She lifted her head at his harsh directive, and with the briefest of glances at Zuko, turned and ran from the garden, back into the palace. "'Zula, _Azula!_" Zuko yelled after her to no effect.

"Let me **go!**" He swung blindly at his father, who laughing, released Zuko to fall on his face.

"You will never find her," Ozai taunted, his voice like the roll of distant thunder when Zuko pushed to his feet. "I killed her by inches and scattered her ashes to the wind. There's nothing left of what she _was_," he whispered, eyes glinting madly. "Only what I **made**."

"_Liar!_" He rushed the larger man, but Ozai bent to grapple with him, the brief exchange ending with Zuko tossed back to the pond's edge. "You're _wrong_," he rejected with a sweep of his hand, "and I'll **prove** you wrong!"

"You think to save her," Ozai laughed at his advance. "You couldn't even save your_self_."

Zuko stopped and stared, horrorstruck, and the world stopped with him. Clouds halted their progress across the sky, the breeze died and let fall the branches of the willow tree. A multitude of ripples stilled in place on the turtleduck pond, like a moment captured in an old portrait, yellowed with time. "No…"

"It finally _occurs_ to you," his father rasped, startling Zuko with the festering burns that had bloomed across his chest and arms, laid bare while Zuko wasn't looking. "That this is no dream."

A manic grin lit his wasted face, all the more terrifying for the fact Zuko had never seen him so happy in life. "Not going to wake up from **this** one, _are you?_"

"No, no, no!" Zuko gripped his head, as the awful reality came clear to him. His father dying in prison of burns he inflicted, if he was here, and Zuko — was —

"Mom!" he realized, eyes darting to where he saw her last. "**Azula!** No, not —" _Not her too_…

Ozai didn't even try to stop him when Zuko ran from the garden, laughing so hard he dropped to one knee, coughing blood. "That's right! Run, boy —" he yelled hoarsely after him, swiping the blood from his mouth with the back of one hand. "Run! _You can't run from the truth forever!_"

No, it couldn't be true. There was so much, so much he still had to do, to die now _unforgiven_ when Mai and Lu Ten still counted on him — It couldn't be true! _Think!_ Zuko plunged into the labyrinth of passageways within the vast palace. _What's the last thing you remember? How did you get here?_

He didn't know how he got here. But he knew who would.

"Azula!" Zuko shouted again, rounding a bend on a corridor he had never seen. She didn't appear, but his own voice sounded from an open doorway to his right, one of countless many that ran the length of this paneled hall, bare of decoration but for a line of ceiling lamps that stretched like signal fires beyond the edges of his sight:

"AZULA!" Zuko caught a glimpse of himself from the outside, rounding on her doctor in the antechamber of her cell at the asylum, eyes wide and furious when he realized her escape. "That isn't _her!_"

The door slammed shut to another shout of "Azula!" behind him. That door opened too on his sister's padded cell, where another Zuko dropped down beside a chained and kneeling Azula, seizing her face in his hands. "It isn't real. There's no one there."

She smirked at that Zuko, a flicker of life behind her broken exterior. "There never is."

"Azula!" Zuko had no sooner started for her than the door swung shut in his face, without even a latch for him to try. It didn't budge when he put his shoulder into it, but the lamp over his head went out.

Zuko couldn't see the way he came, and terrified to try the dark behind him, he raced for the doors still open to the light of the hall, from which spilled a whole chorus of his sister's name: "You're a _monster_ Azula I'm not like you _Azula_ it's time I _faced_ **Azula** I **get** it I screwed up what do you **want** AZULA what do you want?!"

Behind one door and sturdy bars sat a bearded Ozai on his prisoner's pallet, cautious in the face of his demand, "What did you do to Azula?" Behind another, Ty Lee turned on him at the edge of the woods outside the Kyoshi shrine. Her painted eyebrows spelled out her reproach. "Azula's in a lot of trouble! And you could've maybe prevented all this —" Zuko caught another glimpse of himself in Mai's old bedroom, retreating from her harsh insistence, "Because I know Azula, I know how she thinks —"

"— you didn't learn that lesson with **Azula?**" took up that same voice from across the hall, and Zuko's heart seized. "Mai!" he barely had time to gasp, before both doors slammed shut just as he reached them. The light died overhead when his own voice issued from a farther door, "You're my sister, Azula! I want you back."

"You _never_ had me!" her reproach was sealed away behind the asylum door, and still Zuko fled the gaining dark. "Uncle! Aang! _Katara!_" he shouted desperately, not even stopping to try the doors anymore, behind which he caught snatches of a dozen, half a hundred, so many moments shared with them…

Uncle's hand on his shoulder when freshly banished, Zuko stood on a balcony overlooking the canyon at the Western Air Temple. Their door opened on that precipitous drop. Azula plummeted spinning through the mists behind the one opposite, receding even while they watched her fall.

Uncle's hand on his shoulder when visiting their house on Ember Island, a child Zuko stood upon a grassy rise. Both smiling, contented, they watched his friends play on the beach behind another door, just days before Sozin's Comet set the sky on fire.

Aang in the robes of an airbending Master, standing on tiptoes to hug Zuko before he walked out to be crowned Fire Lord. Mai watched them from across the hall, worn but faintly smirking where she sat up in bed holding a newborn Lu Ten in the light from the windows. Their raven heads framed by a golden glow.

Aang perched on a tree root in the dappled sunlight, hugging knees to his chest and looking down on an unmasked Blue Spirit with worried eyes. "Do you think we —" "— should be thanking _you_," Katara spoke fiercely over him from behind another door. She pressed healing water to his wound, where Zuko lay lightning-struck in the dirt.

He saw people and places and moments he hadn't thought of in years: Music night with the crew. The song his mom would sing to him when he was sick in bed. The pearl dagger hid under his pillow 'til Uncle came home from the siege. Dad falling asleep in the royal box to _Love Amongst The Dragons_. The look on Azula's face the first time he bent fire. Mai curled up in a palace alcove, reading a book while they played Hide and Explode. Lu Ten's last visit home on leave —

No sooner did each door swing shut, than he couldn't recall what he saw behind it. His mind grew emptier, yet acceptance wouldn't come. The buzz of panic did not abate, even devoid of context. Grief still welled in his chest like a bottomless gulf. He never knew how much there was to lose, until he lost it.

The hall continued farther than he could see, but the doors ahead were closed. The lamps that way went out in rapid succession, black racing toward him from both sides now. Soon there would be nowhere left to run.

Only one door was left open to him, and he skid to a halt before it, not even winded. He could not have said if he ran for a year or a minute anyway. The gold-inlaid door opened on a sunlit nursery, where a tall woman with brown hair swept up in an elegant half-topknot held the hand of a little boy. He gazed curiously through the carved bars of the crib at a baby girl, who slept with her thumb stuck in her mouth and a purple stuffed animal clutched to her side.

The woman's mouth moved as if speaking, but it wasn't her words that registered. The baby girl — _his sister_ — breathed low, steadily, and he could _feel_ her breathe, with the weight of hours spent watching over her. He used to match his breaths to hers, he remembered suddenly, and feel a warmth kindle inside that he wouldn't realize until years later was his own inner flame. Long before he ever bent fire, she gave that to him…

He just reached for them when the door closed on what was probably his first conscious memory. Another corner of his mind went dark with the last light of the hall. It was only when the last lamp was extinguished that he caught the faint illumination spilling through an open viewing panel in the door behind him.

Eyes watched him from the narrow gap. Eyes gray-gold and narrow shone with unshed tears, beneath forked brows and heavy black bangs. He stepped forward without thinking, reaching for the unseen latch, but the rough steel of the prison door was bare as any in this black black hall. "Mai," he dragged her name back from the dimming recesses of memory. "I'm _so_ sorry."

He wasn't sure what he was sorry for, but he knew — _he knew_ — that he was.

"I knew you'd chase her to the utmost end," Mai spoke tightly. "Hers," her tears finally fell when she whispered, "or _yours_."

The words struck and embedded like one of her hidden knives. "My end?" he repeated in panic. "Mai, what happened? _What happened?_"

But Mai squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head once in denial, before her gaze fixed on something to his right. He just caught a glimpse of the white hand that slid the panel closed, plunging him in darkness. Cutting him off from Mai.

"_Azula!_" He recognized that hand, sharp nails he felt the bite of more than once. "Where are you?"

"Where I _always_ am, Zuzu," she teased from the impenetrable dark. He sensed her move behind him, beside him, her fingers ran along the line of his shoulders, perceptible more for their motion than contact through the stiff leather of his ceremonial armor. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, when Azula whispered in his ear, "One step ahead."

The lamps hung from the high ceiling — the _electric_ lamps, he dimly recalled — lit her signature blue when she encircled him. One hand slid along his shoulder guard, while her right reached into his hair to pull the clasp that held his topknot in place. The shaggy mop fell loose around his ears.

"I _like_ it down," she practically purred. Her nose brushed his chin when she slinked close, dressed in nothing but her sleeping robe while he wore full armor, her feet and face both left bare. How much younger she looked, without her makeup on. The harsh blue light cast her skin and dark hair in stunning contrast. When she pressed a kiss to the ridges of his scar, he could almost feel her smirking. "You look like a **peasant**."

Dazed by her closeness, it took him a second to react. But Azula ducked his grip, dancing just out of reach before he could decide whether to push her away or trap her against him. "I told you," she laughed when he started forward, "you'll never catch up."

"Stop _screwing_ around!" he snapped, unsettled by her teasing on top of everything else. They were in the hall of Fire Lord portraits now, without explanation. Deep shadows clung to the dragons that wound up the pillars in the eerie blue light of her flames. "And **tell** me what happened!"

"_Well_, since you ask so nicely," she sighed insincerely, and walked away in utter unconcern. "You got caught up navel gazing and forgot we had a race."

"I meant — wait, _what_ race?" he followed her in consternation.

"The only one that counts," she replied to thin air, and cast a sharp glance over her left shoulder at him. "You _should_ know, I'm winning."

"The throne," he realized, before a creeping suspicion made him grab for her arm. Azula side-stepped him, slippery as always, and elbowed him in the ribs instead. "What did you do?" he demanded, clutching his side in reproach. "Azula, _what did you do?_"

His sister flashed him a vicious grin in answer, before she broke and ran from him. He knew where she was headed.

"AZULA!" He barely gave chase before more screams split the air, and Zuko turned too late to stop divided imperial firebenders whose fight spilled into the portrait hall, when some of these fired on his fleeing servants. "No, stop! I _command_ you!" he shouted uselessly, when these same guards turned on his defenders and struck them down.

Their flames burned orange, his people perished in full color, and Zuko realized too late he was the only person or fixture left standing in the hall that still shone blue. They couldn't see or hear him. But somehow, Azula could.

"My **family** _lives_ here!" Zuko roared, when he caught her silhouette watching from a curtained archway at the near end of the hall. He wanted to cry. "Katara and Aang —"

"Then they should take a lesson from _Mother_." She retreated, unhurried at his angry approach. "This is what it costs to love you."

"_Shut up!_" Zuko made another grab for her, but she ducked into the adjoining hall and tangled him in the curtain when he gave chase. He tore the crimson cloth free and cast it at his feet. It pooled like old blood, almost black in the light of her flames, burning from great torches fixed high on the paneled walls and glass lamps hung from the vault ceiling.

"You **don't** get to blame this on me! _You_ did this, how could you **do** it?" he shouted, overtaking Azula beside his own royal portrait, hung opposite the flame-edged arch to the throne room. When his attempt to catch her was repulsed, Zuko blocked her instead.

"I haven't had a full night's sleep since you **escaped!**" He indicated himself with an angry thrust of his hand. He felt confident of that much, with her near. She was like an anchor for his memories. "I risked everything to look for you!" Zuko recalled his flight with June. "I fought for you, I _bled_ for you!"

"And when did I ask for any of it?" his sister demanded, losing patience so close to her goal. "I _never_ wanted you!

"You served my purpose once," she sneered at Zuko when his hands dropped, wounded despite himself and her and everything she did… "You were a source of some _amusement_," Azula was saying. "Now you're just in my way." She pushed past him in contempt. "But not for long."

It was the opening he needed. Zuko sidestepped her heel to the chest, grabbing her wrist to twist her arm behind her. When she rolled with the torque, he blocked the kick Azula aimed at him to sweep her off her feet. Thus entangled, they both tumbled to the gray stone mosaic carved in concentric circles on the floor. But he was on top, that was what mattered.

She laughed at him, her long hair pooling on the tiles. "If this was what you wanted, I can think —"

"Be **quiet!**" The steel cuff of his boot dug into her stomach to no effect, he pinned her by her slim neck to snarl, "You're going to _fix_ this, undo everything you **did**, or so help me —"

"You'll _what?_" Azula called his bluff, and thrust two fingers of her left hand into the hollow of his jaw. "You're dead."

"_No_…" he denied it brokenly. His tears fell on her face, in substitute for tears that she would never shed for him. _Azula always lies_. Except when the truth was crueler.

Because it was true. It happened. It happened. And no promise she made would ever take it back.

Azula condescended to pat his cheek, before she pushed Zuko off to sit up beside him. He hunched inward, gripping his head against the awful weight of it. He knelt there wanting to vomit, wanting to scream, wanting to set something on fire, until her muttered, "Where is it?" registered the fact of her searching his pockets, the gaps in his armor…

"What —" he spoke, but hardly knew what he was saying.

"The **crown**, dumdum." She shifted closer to reach behind Zuko, her gaze turned provocatively up at him. "Why else would I be here?"

"_You_ —" His voice choked with rage, but his sister was distracted when she withdrew something tucked unknowingly into his belt.

"Zuzu," she _tsk_ed with fond contempt. "Trust you to bring a knife to an Agni Kai." She sat back to examine the pearl dagger Uncle sent him all those years ago, her glance dismissive when she turned it over in her hands.

"This should have been _mine_," she judged coolly, and lifted hard eyes to his. "I would know what to **do** with it."

Her surprise when he tore the dagger from her grip was gratifying. But not so much as when he thrust it into her belly, and Azula bent with a swift cry that might be anguish or ecstasy or that heady combination of the two he only ever knew at her hands —

He struck again and again like a heat-maddened viper. But the awful triumph turned to ashes in his mouth, when every blow was her fingers dug into his back, legs wrapped around his waist, heart beating frantically behind her ribs. When every cry was blood on her lips, the salt tang of her tears. Her silent pleas naming him _Father_…

He knew how he got here.

When Zuko dropped the dagger to the blood-smeared stone, it wasn't a dagger anymore but the flame crest of his office, stained red. He barely heard it hit the floor before Azula struck back with a swift series of _chi_-blocking punches, and he fell paralyzed almost on top of her.

Zuko cried with remorse while she struggled out from under him to scramble free, and snatch the crown pointlessly out of his reach. She staggered to her feet, almost fell and righted herself before she turned on him, stumbling. He could see the stains spreading on the rich crimson of her robe, even if her lifeblood weren't dripping to her feet.

Her face was paper-white and her eyes were two bruises, hollow with lack of sleep — or sickness. Her makeup ran with tears he never saw her shed. Her painted mouth twisted into what might be a ragged smirk but looked equally like a grimace, when she swept her hair up into a clumsy topknot and perched the flame headpiece there. Defensive wounds scored her arms, laid bare to the elbow.

She swayed on her feet and bent to hug herself around the middle before Zuko could choke out, "Why didn't you _tell_ me?"

"Why should I have to?" she demanded in kind, reduced to a harsh whisper. "I'm **done** proving anything to you. And you have nothing left that I want." She lifted her head and stood painfully straight. "Except to die knowing you **brought** this on your_self_."

He couldn't speak her a word in reply, when she told him, "Goodbye, Zuko."

_Don't go_, he thought at her, when she ran stumbling for the throne room and left a trail of blood in her wake. The harsh blue light of her flames settled to a warm orange._ You're hurt. You need help. _How could he say it, knowing he was the one who hurt her? It didn't make it any less true.

_I miss you_, he thought, before the curtain even fell closed behind her._ I love you. I'm sorry_…

"Get up!"

So overwhelming was his grief that Zuko barely registered the presence of another person, before the old man was yanking him up by the armpits, chiding, "You fool boy! As if you could be _chi_-blocked in the Spirit World, any more than she could **bend?**"

Zuko realized it was true, when he pushed away to stand unassisted. "Who —" he started in astonishment, and stopped. "Avatar Roku?" The crown prince's headpiece registered dimly to his fading memory. "What are you doing here?"

"A better question is, _what were you thinking?_" His white-bearded ancestor thrust an angry hand at the bloodslick tiles behind them, and Zuko cringed despite himself. "You saw that?"

Roku hardly seemed to hear him, barely checked in his rebuke. "When I first learned of _that child_," he hissed with a vehemence that shocked Zuko, "and its connection to you, I thought — she must have seduced or entrapped you. This was some plot to discredit you or gain the throne.

"Never once did I guess you were a **willing party **to this abomination!" Roku dropped his voice to add, "Until I saw the _look on your face_."

He recalled what he felt that first time he stabbed her, and wondered uncomfortably how it looked from the outside. "You never met _either_ of us!" Zuko protested, his accusations too much to bear. "What makes you think you know anything **about** me, or her?"

"I know _enough_," Roku grimly insisted, tucking hands in his voluminous sleeves. "From Aang, and from observing you at sites of spiritual power, where my connection to your world is strongest.

"From a young age, you showed _such_ promise," the old Avatar lectured, his stern glare reminiscent of Ursa, "a restraint and native compassion absent from the royal family for too long. I thought that you would be the one to break the cycle of violence in your family. Instead you have **perpetuated** it, with her."

Zuko glanced down in shame, knowing he betrayed Ir— his fa— his uncle's hopes no less by his crime. He would never get to explain now even if he could, his last words to the man — he loved — he loved like a father wasted on misplaced blame…

"Azula was made to be your complement, as you are hers," Roku was saying. "A necessary evil, perhaps, but _necessary_. Your talents and perspectives combined might have brought **balance** to the Fire Nation," the old Avatar exhorted, grabbing his elbow to fix his attention.

"Instead you breed _corruption_, give yourselves over to unnatural lusts!" Roku spat, with such disgust that Zuko first flinched and then glared at him. "I **expected** her unrepentance, but you —"

"Wait, _what?_ You talked to her?" Zuko demanded, woken from his despair. "Does —"

The long, low wail that issued from the throne room at that moment erased every other thought from his dying mind. "No," he whispered, starting for the curtained entry. "Azula!"

"You're going the wrong way!" Roku moved to block him, but Zuko pushed him aside, her every halting sob cutting him like a knife. "She needs help!"

"That isn't your sister," Roku insisted, grabbing his arm to detain him. "Only your image of —"

"I can _save_ her!" A dim crimson light bled into the hall, when Azula screamed as she had done chained to the grate beneath Sozin's Comet. He could hear the rush of fire she breathed, but Roku blocked his way again.

"It's not even her —"

"_I don't care!_" the anguished cry tore from his throat like a torrent of flame, while creeping dark sapped the light from every torch and lamp that lit the hall. "Whatever she is, she's what I have **left** and —"

"_Listen_ to me!" The old Avatar gripped his spiked shoulders, lines etched deeply on his face when he warned, "Better men than you have followed visions to their **doom**, and the _peril_ of your world! Remember how you got h—"

Azula made a sound so frightening it stopped even Roku talking, half a low groan and half a bellow. A sound Zuko thought — he almost remembered — he only heard from a woman one time before. And for once, he knew what she needed.

"MOVE!" Zuko threw his hands off and ran for the flame-edged archway. Roku muttered something vaguely deprecating behind him, his old eyes lighting through the dark, but finally gave no pursuit.

Zuko was beyond listening, when he pushed past the curtain to find her kneeling on the throne, reduced to silhouette behind a wall of blue flames. Across the expanse of black tile floor that separated them, he could see how she bent gripping her middle, her chin down and knees spread apart while she screamed. She breathed fire with every cry, and the dais and the ancient canopy burned unchecked around her. If she heard him shout her name, she gave no indication of it, lost to her pain.

He pushed the fear down deep in his stomach and ran to her, when the last thing he wanted was to face the awful consequence of what they did. He remembered with shocking clarity the muted alarm on her doctors' faces, when he told them she was pregnant. Their outrage when they demanded how her caretakers could let this happen. Didn't they know she could die, it could kill her? Her body wasn't fit for bearing children.

Her body wasn't here, any more than their — their _baby_, he stumbled over the word and its new immediacy. Her every wail still punched through him like a shot to the chest. None of this was real in that sense, but it wasn't a dream either. Everything that happened in the Spirit World held some significance, didn't it? If he could reach her here, maybe —

But the harder he ran, the more the distance stretched between them. She was close enough for him to see and hear her suffering, obscured behind a wall of flame, but there was nothing, _nothing_ he could do for her, and Zuko grew increasingly desperate when he began to wonder if this was some private hell…

By the time Azula fell on her side, the noises she made were … appalling. She choked on her screams, her helpless crying punctuated by animal moans and half-conscious grunts jerked from her as from an injured person being dragged to her death. She didn't sound like a woman in labor anymore. She sounded like — like someone being _eaten_.

He screamed her name once more, brokenly; he should be hoarse with how many times he screamed it. This time the flames answered him. They spoke his name with her voice, but all Zuko heard was loss.

"NO!" his despairing cry matched the last scream that pealed from his sister, with a gout of flame. He finally closed the distance to the stone trough, bringing his hands up only to part them swiftly. When the wall of blue fire was snuffed, it took him a second to realize the flames did not obey him, after all. It took the sight that greeted Zuko for him to realize why…

She was dead.

He didn't know how it was possible in the Spirit World, any more than her bending. He only knew the dim orange light of the burning throne reflected in her glassy eyes wasn't her fire. Her fire went out.

She lay curled on her left side with legs parted, the curve of her hip sharply upthrust. The whole lower half of her body was burnt and bloodied almost beyond recognition. The tatters of her silk sleeping robe had melted into her flesh, and he couldn't distinguish one from the other.

It should have smelled awful, but nothing smelled or tasted or registered to touch here. He wondered when he would stop seeing and hearing. Oblivion would be better than this.

Her face and even her lacerated arms were untouched by comparison. Her eyes stared lifeless, fixed on nothing, her lips parted. One arm was trapped under her and the other draped over the edge of the throne seat, as if she died reaching for —

A loud _crack_ split the canopy burning over their heads the moment he saw it, and he made the only decision he could, lunging over the edge of the stone trough to grab the bundle laid before the throne. He barely snatched the newborn to safety and turned to run before the whole structure collapsed with a force that knocked him off his feet. It was like a punch to the chest, and he barely managed to twist and take the impact in his back and elbows.

He didn't feel the fall through his armor or the deadening effects of this place. He didn't know if the baby would feel it either, if it could even be harmed, but acted simply on instinct. He sat up with it cradled to his chestplate to see the great canopy reduced to a burning heap, the gilded timbers and splintered pillars that buried his sister…

Her throne became her funeral pyre. She was dead.

Or she would die or was dying — He didn't know what any of it meant, even if he could guess…

He didn't want to guess. It was beyond his power to help any of it, now. He turned his attention to the little weight in his arms, still slick with her blood.

It was blue.

It stayed blue even when he frantically swiped the blood away, its skin hard to the touch and covered all over with raised bumps. Had it been stillborn and deformed, after everything?

His heart throbbed painfully in his chest, and tears burned his eyes. It felt so warm against him, but he just snatched it from the fire. He had thought he saw it move in the shifting light that split-second before —

It took him a moment to register. It felt warm. He could _feel_ its heat, the ridges of what he realized with a shock were scales beneath his fingertips. Its jaw was long and narrow, bearded with a soft tuft of hair. The ridges of its eyebrows were two horns with points curved wickedly forward, above delicate orbital fins. Its eyes were his own gold, its pupils two black slits grown wide in the low light when it studied him back.

Long whiskers twined the length of its sinuous body, when it uncurled the tufted tail tucked up against its pale underbelly. Each sturdy limb ended in four digits tipped with claws, and its shoulders were broad and powerful. He only realized when they shifted that the bony structures trapped in the crook of his arm were _wings_. It yawned to reveal a mouthful of sharp teeth, its long tongue flicked up as if to taste the air, and he could have cried.

It was — "A _dragon_," he whispered wonderingly. _She gave birth to a dragon_…

Born of their hatred, their shared past, their pain. It was inhuman, and beautiful. A beautiful monster.

_Just like her_.

His heart ached when it closed his finger in a delicate grip. There was something so familiar about — But the farther he reached for that hint of a memory, the more it slipped from his grasp. Its claws didn't pierce his skin, and seeing his distress, it made a low, trilling sound. He thought he knew what it asked.

_Sad?_

His mouth twisted with grief when he hugged it close. The fires of the throne room burned so low by this time that he could barely see. He spoke tightly, "_I wish I could have known you_."

It blinked what he could only guess was a third eyelid, a reaction he couldn't begin to read, and reached one of its whiskers up to his face. It just touched his forehead when the ruined throne exploded without warning. The compressed air hit him like a punch to the chest, and suddenly, he couldn't breathe _he couldn't breathe_ he couldn't — he —

* * *

She was sure no one breathed, in the wake of her awful pronouncement. Mai's strangled sobs just expressed what they each felt, the only break in the silence until Aang spoke quietly beside her, "No.

"I won't lose another _**friend**_." Katara looked quickly up at him, eyes widening at the depth and timbre she had only heard in his voice a very few times. The arrows on his hands lit where they held Momo against him, tucked under his shirt. "_**NOT NOW. NOT EVER.**_"

His eyes and tattoos glowed bright in the moonlit hall when he entered the Avatar State. Aang set his feet and bent his hands with fingers splayed as expertly as Hama did, as if he had bloodbent a hundred times before when Katara never taught him, when her gentle love would never ask —

Of _course_. Katara sucked in a quick breath. Why didn't she think of it? If waterbending existed before the Avatar, the ability to bend blood must be older than Hama's discovery. Any of Aang's past lives might have learned to bloodbend, if only to suppress or fight against it.

It wasn't a full moon, but Aang was the Avatar. The same rules didn't apply to him…

At first it was horrifying. More like watching someone reanimate a corpse than revive an injured person. Zuko's back arched and limbs jerked where he lay, as if he were hit by an electric shock. A rosy flush suffused his skin only to retreat and reappear with every beat Aang forced from his still heart. When Aang clenched fingers and he thrashed a second time, his face tensed, the first indication Zuko felt anything at all.

His low, rasping gurgle drew a gasp from Mai, and Katara realized with a swift surge of hope that he was trying to breathe. She looked quickly to Aang, but he was too absorbed in the delicate work to notice. Katara feared to interrupt him, if he could even be expected to bloodbend and airbend at the same time.

It hit Katara with a shock that _she_ could breathe for him. Every member of her tribe learned from a young age how to force air into the lungs of a drowned person. If Zuko had fluid in his lungs or something like —

She sprang into action, the memory writ deeply in her muscles as any waterbending kata. She pinched his nose to tilt his head back, grabbed his chin and sealed her mouth to his. Mai startled where she knelt clutching the folds of her dress in white-knuckled hands. But Katara just glimpsed the flash of recognition on her face, when his chest rose with each strong breath she blew into his mouth.

She turned her head and bent her ear to listen — "Come _on_," Katara pushed on his chest to urge him, when Zuko barely managed a shallow wheeze cut short, cringing. Tears streamed from his good eye, and sweat stood out on his face from the pain of their efforts to revive him. "Breathe!"

She forced two more breaths into Zuko before his _chi_ flooded back in a sudden bloom of heat, and Katara sat back quickly when he choked. Then a moment came when Zuko began to breathe on his own, wracked with violent coughing that made him fold sideways and draw stiff limbs in to himself, as if he swallowed seawater instead of poison. He shivered uncontrollably, but his skin had lost the awful gray cast, and his lips were only colorless, not blue.

He collapsed on his back again, weak as a kitten. When he cracked both eyes open, the whole and the ruined one, bloodshot and startling gold even in moonlight, Katara could have cheered.

"You _did_ it!" She jumped up to catch Aang when he stumbled, coming down from the Avatar State. "Oh, Aang…"

"We did it," he corrected, managing a weak smile and a one-armed hug before they looked to Zuko again.

He turned his head, straining, eyes searching for — "Mai?" he croaked to find her sat beside him, and whatever spell that held her paralyzed was broken.

"You idiot!" Mai choked out tearfully, smacking his shoulder. "_You didn't have a taster for the tea!_"

Zuko winced but didn't answer her, his taut face white with pain and brow furrowed anxiously. His good eye filled with tears when he gasped, "_Lu Ten_."

Mai looked like Zuko had slapped her. More emotions than Katara had ever seen in her consecutively let alone at one time drained from her face. "No."

"We're getting him, and getting **out** of here," Aang spoke harshly, cradling the lump buried under his shirt, and Katara silently agreed. Zuko wouldn't be safe here, couldn't get the help he still needed. They didn't even know who did this, if the palace had fallen, how many of his own people could be trusted —

"I'm afraid not," a man's voice spoke mildly behind them and she and Aang turned quickly to face him, while fires blazed to life in every sconce that lined the paneled wall.

Zuko's court chamberlain stood flanked by upwards of a dozen imperial firebenders, glasses glinting in the firelight and shockingly close. He could have ordered their attack at any time while she and Aang helped Zuko. They wouldn't have stood a chance…

A quick glance behind her brought the sobering reality that guards had closed on them in their distraction from that side too. They were surrounded, confined with an injured teammate to defend, outnumbered… Mai climbed slowly to her feet, while Zuko struggled to push himself up on his elbows, cringing with chest pains, probably hurt worse by the same bloodbending that revived him.

"The prince is safe in our custody," the old man — Master Han — was saying, his lined face grim. "So will you be, if you surrender peacefully."

"_Safe?_" Katara thrust a finger at him accusation. "**You're** the one who poisoned him!" The chamberlain frowned as if offended, but made no attempt to deny it. "When I caught you arguing with that noble — You tried to pass it off as nothing, but all that time you were _conspiring_ against Zuko!"

"It was never my wish that he should be harmed," Han denied, tucking hands in his voluminous sleeves. "Unfortunately, I was overruled. But now —" He looked intently to Mai, standing white-faced and rigid beside the injured Fire Lord. "Now all is changed.

"My Lady, with your influence on the regency council, I know we could convince them to let your husband live under _house arrest_," he appealed to Mai, who looked on the chamberlain in shock. "He can get the care he needs, live out the rest of his days in comfort, be a father to your son…

"Your opinion and political acumen are well-respected, even among those who disagree with you," Han pressed. "_Yours_ could be the hand that guides our nation to a brighter future! If you saw fit to join us, you would be well-positioned to protect your son and his legacy."

"You w— you want to — _crown_ Lu Ten?" Mai spoke numbly, her eyes wide with disbelief. Aang just stared, stunned by the turn their confrontation took, while Zuko looked up at Mai in mute appeal, his mouth forming a silent plea.

Katara realized with a shock that he thought she would accept. _What kind of woman joins her husband's killers?_ she wondered, before her heart and her face both hardened. _The kind who would willingly fight for _Azula, Katara reminded herself, and uncorked her waterskin in readiness.

But Mai wasn't looking at any of them, seemingly frozen, her narrow eyes fixed unblinking on the court chamberlain. "Please accept our friendship, and the hand of peace," Han urged her, holding out his own hand so gravely it was clear this offer would not be made twice. "For the sake of your son and our people both."

Even watching Mai so closely, Katara almost missed the blade that appeared in her hand as if conjured from air, her still face contorted with fury — "_Traitor!_" her shriek rang the length of the peristyle, when she let fly at the chamberlain.

He stepped quickly back, but was only saved from a knife to the heart by the quick intervention of one of the guards, who knocked the blade aside with a deft spin of his halberd. Han straightened his robes and looked to her without resentment, only regret. "I was afraid you'd say that."

Mai threw off Aang when he moved to stop her loosing a second knife, but only clutched the blade so tightly Katara thought she might have a scar to match her recent one — if they lived that long. The airbender glanced anxiously between them and the guards. Katara could tell he didn't like their odds any better than she did.

"_Why?_" Zuko spoke up forlornly from their feet, still propped on his elbows with knees bent and in obvious pain. "Why did — you **do** this?"

"I think you are a good man, _Prince_ Zuko," the chamberlain spoke slowly, deliberately, "but not a good Fire Lord. In these critical times, **greatness** is needed. And one who has been raised to the task."

"_Azula_…" Zuko laughed and cried at once, sounding for a moment every bit as unhinged as his maniac sister. Han looked on him in undisguised pity, before his broken laughter turned to wracking coughs and Zuko folded, arms tucked against the pain in his chest.

"You would give _my baby_," Mai spoke low, knife glinting in hand, "to that scheming bitch?"

"No, my Lady," Han answered almost sadly, his spectacled gaze fixed significantly on Mai. "_You_ would."

Mai jerked as if physically struck when she caught his meaning. The rebels needed a capable royal to replace Zuko, someone to rule as regent until his son grew up. When Mai refused to play that part —

"Take them into custody," the chamberlain ordered, before she could form any reply.

Katara and Aang just took defensive stances against the advance of his guards, when a low bellow announced Appa landing in the moonlit courtyard at their backs. The _thump_ of his flat tail knocked their nearest assailants back with a great gust, but Aang shielded his companions from it with airbending. "Let's go!" he shouted to Katara over the wind, but she was one step ahead of him.

Every shrub, tree, and flower in the courtyard outside their peristyle withered as one, when she bent the water from them to join with her meager supply. She was just in time to shield them from the fire of his traitor guards with a wall of water that doused the blasts. Flinging one arm down, she diverted part of the standing wave beneath them and swept herself and Zuko through the high curtain-hung arches and into the courtyard.

Aang jumped the wave that propelled them toward Appa, moving to retrieve Mai instead, who recovered from her shock only to fling curses and what looked like every blade on her person at Han and the imperial firebenders. To Katara's outrage, these aimed their return fire not at Mai, but _Aang_. The winds he bent to deflect their blasts caught and flung her knives off-target too, while Katara hauled a groaning Zuko up into the saddle, his eyes dull with pain. His face grew tenser and more worried with every shout from Mai —

"Sorry!" she heard Aang yell, when upon fighting his way over to Mai, he simply flung her over his shoulder in preference to arguing. She had apparently run out of knives and was reduced to pounding fists against his back and screeching her protest, when Aang sprinted with her to the waiting howdah.

Katara just had time to wonder at Appa being saddled before she caught scorch marks and the glint of fresh blood dark in the moonlight, on their supplies bundled and tied down in back of the howdah, on the curved edge of the saddle — And her eyes stung when she realized some loyal servants of Zuko probably paid with their lives just to help them escape.

"_Yip yip!_" Aang yelled urgently upon boosting himself and Mai into the howdah with his airbending. Appa charged a few running imperial firebenders to knock them down with a headbutt, growling, and swept more out of the way with his tail before he took to the air. He flew quickly to escape the range of the fireballs they threw after him, singing his coat.

Mai didn't speak or move from where Aang dumped her unceremoniously to one side of the howdah, just looped her arm through the saddle rim and watched the courtyard and then the palace recede below them, fires burning unchecked in the caldera. The coup had spread beyond the palace.

She didn't look once at Zuko, laid on his back and clutching his chest while he shivered, his breaths ragged and uneven. It took Katara a moment to realize he was crying.

"Just hold still," she urged Zuko, remembering she hadn't had a chance to heal him yet, and he was still in pain. She eased his shaking hands away and bent water from her skin to press it to his chest, infusing the water with her _chi_. "I'll do what I can for you."

That turned out not to be much. She knew his heart was damaged somehow, that much was obvious just from his pulse, weak and irregular beneath her fingertips when she held them to his neck. Probably also his lungs, maybe his liver and other organs, from metabolizing whatever poisoned him…

But her waterbending would tell her no more of hidden injuries she couldn't see or sense. This wasn't like the cuts and bruises and burns she healed before. She had little idea of the structures she was working with or even how they were damaged, let alone how to go about fixing it. Even simply directing his _chi_ there yielded little improvement.

Zuko watched her face anxiously in the blue light of her healing water, eyes bruised and so pale. And all Katara could think of was her angry insistence, _I don't want to heal, I want to _fight! She would never regret training under Pakku, but it had been four years since the war ended, and she never went back. She never took the time to learn more. Now Zuko was paying for her oversight, when he already lost so much…

She bent the water back into her pouch with a sinking heart. "I'm sorry, but — there's not much I can do to heal injuries this severe, under the surface." Katara drew a deep breath. "We're going to have to take you to the North Pole —"

"_The North_ —" Zuko started with alarm before he fell back, cringing. "No! You can't —" He looked quickly to Mai, still sat rigid at the saddle's edge with her face turned away, watching the dark waters of the bay pass beneath them.

"It's okay, everything'll be okay," Katara rushed to reassure him, her hands on his shoulders holding him down. "They have the best healers in the world. They'll get you back to full strength. And I think — I can keep you stable 'til we get there."

"That's — **not** —" Zuko spoke painfully, then seemed to give up, biting his lip to look away from Mai and her both. Her heart ached for him all over again, and Katara laid a cool hand on his forehead.

"I'm going to tell Aang." She glanced to where he had taken his seat steering Appa, without a word to any of them. "Just try to get some rest. Don't overtax yourself," she warned Zuko, who barely seemed to hear her. She had spoken loud enough to be heard over the wind from their passage. She glanced to Mai, still ignoring him, and felt something close to hatred.

Aang seemed unsurprised by her plan, he had been thinking the same thing. He was a lot more subdued than normal, even considering the awful events of the past night. He didn't shrug off the hand Katara laid on his shoulder, but just glanced down at the lump of charred flesh that had been Momo, still tucked under his shirt, before he scratched the back of Appa's head. The bison answered with a mournful groan.

"Are you okay?" She rubbed his back, and Aang shook his head. "No. But I will be," he said softly.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"I just — need to be alone right now," Aang spoke low. Tears started to his eyes, and Katara moved to hug him. "Aang —"

He shook his head emphatically. "Zuko needs you more," he pointed out, her selfless husband. It didn't make his denial sting any less. "I'll be okay. You should help him now."

Katara nodded with lips pursed. Her hand slipped from his back and she climbed back into the howdah to find Mai unmoved and unmoving, except for her forehead laid against the rim of the saddle. Katara wondered if having no soul made it easy to sleep.

She dared to hope Zuko had managed too, when she saw him lying on his side, hunched inward and facing away from Mai. Until she caught his shoulders shake with quiet sobs.

Katara found a more willing target for her comfort in Zuko, when she draped him in one of the blankets **not** stained with blood and knelt to ease him on his back again, laying his head in her lap. She stroked his hair, still damp with sweat, and gently shushed his tears while he gazed despairing up at her.

She had never seen him look like this before. Katara would do anything to fix this hurt but didn't know if she could —

She wasn't sure when she glanced to Mai again, but her thoughts must have shown for Zuko to speak up hoarsely, startling her, "She lost — her son too." His mouth bent with grief when he looked to his wife, impossibly distant. "Because — of me. Because I couldn't — protect them. My _son_…" he wept, voice breaking.

Katara blinked back tears when she realized what she should have done the first time, that this was why Zuko didn't want to fly north. That every second he spent in the air or being healed was another second Lu Ten spent in the hands of his enemies.

It was still strange to her, to think of Zuko as a father when he had been her friend first. But he was a _good_ father, he had to know that, no matter what happened… Zuko spoke almost too low to make out, his face drawn, talking to himself, "**This** — is what it — _costs_ — to love y—"

"They won't hurt him," Katara said swiftly and turned his head, before he could get more worked up. It was obvious every word caused him pain. "They have to keep him _safe_, if they want to rule in your name. They have to keep him safe until they find your sister —"

"My sist—" Zuko barked out what might have been a bitter laugh or a choked sob. "We don't — even know — if she's still — alive. I might — never see her — again. The last thing — I said — what I _did_ — Oh gods, 'Zula — I'm **so** sorry…"

Then he could say no more, hiding his face in his hands while he cried. Mai lifted her head and looked at Zuko as if she didn't recognize him, her eyes hollow and rimmed with red. Katara realized she hadn't been sleeping, at the dried tears that streaked her thin face and made her makeup run.

The rim of the saddle left an imprint on her forehead, just visible behind her tousled bangs. Mai blinked once slowly, without expression. She got up and walked to the front of the howdah and curled up with her back to them, head tucked and hands braced behind her neck.

The half moon obscured behind clouds at that moment couldn't match the darkness in her heart, when Katara glared ice daggers at that turned back and cradled the head of her hurting friend.

* * *

She would have said she woke, if Azula had any sense of time having passed or rest gained. Instead, she ran through a rustic _torii_ gate at the center of a dying world one moment only to emerge in the shadow of a five-tiered temple the next. She tripped on the inclined walkway that climbed an ashy slope and bridged streams of lava which flowed hissing into the sea below.

She would have said she woke, but only the disorientation was the same.

Besides the _torii_ gate, everything was changed. Everything was gone. Even — "Baby?" She looked around frantically for the little girl, shifting on her knees in the ashes. "_Baby!_"

Her throat grew tight when Azula remembered running to her, those last dire moments united in fear. How the stars went out and the Moon turned red. "Blood moon," she realized like a punch to the chest. Did it mean —

Did she lose the baby?

But she was still in the Spirit World, to judge by Roku's temple standing intact upon the arc of Crescent Island, when it was destroyed by the Avatar's own hand. The cloud-filled sky had not lost the peach hues of sunset, nor the sun sunk any closer to the horizon since she arrived.

Wouldn't something so traumatic as a miscarriage kick her out of the Spirit World, back into her body? _Unless it killed you too_, came the unwelcome thought. _You knew it could happen and still took that chance. It wasn't much of a choice, but you made it_…

That was how the red dragon found her, knelt shaking with head bent and fingers gripping the ashes that blanketed this volcanic island. He must have flown out of the sun for Azula not to see him coming, if this place obeyed any rule of logic, and it didn't.

Roku's dragon encircled her and the _torii_ gate both. He landed on his scaled belly to form a perfect circle, like a serpent eating its own tail. Azula stood and turned to face the dragon, and he lifted his blunt head to look appraisingly at her.

She spoke his name, her voice curiously hollow, "Fang." He answered with a low rumble, deep in his throat. "Why are you here?"

The dragon laid his head down again, a clear invitation to mount, but something was holding Azula back…

Not something, she _knew_ what. "Where is she?" Azula demanded of him, voice tight as her clenched hands. Fang blinked a third eyelid at her. She didn't know what answer she was expecting, but pressed, "Where is — my —"

She couldn't say it, but the dragon seemed to understand. He looped his head closer on the sinuous neck, and reached out with one of his whiskers to touch first her abdomen, then her forehead, then her chestplate. With each touch, a new image assaulted her, plucked from her own memories, brought freshly to life —

_lying on Ty Lee's bed hugging her frilly pillow and crying until she felt wrung dry her best friend rubbing circles on her back and her hand laid on her bump while strange voices talked around her about her but she could only count the weeks her second trimester it should bother her more than a head of dark hair emerging from concealment her hands shaking when she replaced the golden flame in her topknot a princess of the Fire Nation like me_ —

Azula dropped to her knees with a stifled cry. She could almost see the girl run from behind the _torii_ gate again, white-faced with terror flushed red in the light of a dying moon — Then the moment was gone.

"She c-called me —" Her mouth formed the word, one syllable, so easy it was the first that many ever spoke. But she couldn't speak it.

To Azula, that word meant only pain, rejection. Longing for something never known and half-imagined. It meant the same thing it had always meant. Why should it hurt so much more?

Again, the dragon seemed to understand better what she _didn't_ say. He touched a whisker to her forehead —

_blue Roku urged his ghostly mount down toward the baked dirt of a tiny village some dozen houses and town hall enclosed by low walls and encroaching trees and rounded peaks of ancient mountain ranges _do you think she'll be safe here Fang _when they rounded the watchtower she came into sight eased a bucket of water out on the well-ledge wiped sweat from her brow looked into the sun it was _—

Ursa. In her banishment.

Azula would know that face anywhere, so many times she'd seen it. Even older, tired, tanned by the sun, hair pulled tightly back in a low bun and dressed in peasant rags _she knew that face_. It was her. Her mother and —

_The Earth Kingdom village where she had lived for some years in obscurity_, was Roku's unhelpful description. Azula had never laid eyes on the pitiful backwater, even if its rounded rooftops, vaguely bell-shaped, touched a cord in her memory. She had traveled too much in recent months to pin it down, but Azula didn't need to. Not when answers were nearer at hand…

"Show me."

Fang lowered his head, and Azula climbed on behind his white horns without hesitation this time. The baby and all her other problems would still be waiting for her when she returned to her body. _Or not, but_ —

That couldn't happen until she met her objective. _Priorities_. She sat astride the white ridge of his back and gripped the horns that arced like points of a crescent and told herself, _Focus on something you _can_ fix_.

Then the dragon took flight. And her heart soared to leave every doubt and care in the dust.

With everything Azula read and learned about the mythic beasts, somehow she never guessed that the wings were almost irrelevant. The dragon did not flap or even glide so much as coil through the air. Neither did he propel himself with fire like she sometimes did.

He _was_ fire, given form. Unchecked, expansive. Ever changing, yet timeless, inviolable. Matter into energy, light and heat unlocked from lesser elements. It was not one of them, of another nature altogether yet connected inextricably.

It changed the substance of everything it touched. Even her.

If this was what it was like to ride a _dead_ dragon — Azula realized she had leaned forward to hug the bend of his horns, so badly she wanted to feel the heat of him between her legs, the wind in her face, the swooping of her own stomach when he climbed and plunged and rolled —

But there was nothing to feel in the Spirit World. Except the fresh regret of being born too late.

"_He was a fool_," she whispered, clearly audible in the absence of wind. "In this. In other things…"

She could almost swear Fang glanced back at her. With a flick of his red-tufted tail, the dragon banked east along the outside edge of Crescent Island.

They flew with the setting sun at their backs, into a full moon rising.

* * *

**Three month update is due to, besides the usual suspects, the difficulty of writing the Spirit World, an Empathic Environment full of symbolism bordering on Mind Screw. To defray any accusations of such, a few points that might help orient you in regard to a certain section: Zuko WAS in the Spirit World because he was actually clinically dead. His perceptions and experience there were shaped by events and revelations Zuko could not consciously remember, in full or in part. A****t first as his awareness was catching up to his new state, and then increasingly later as he was losing his identity. **Zuko was being stripped of his old life and identity in preparation to be reincarnated, since that seems to be an idea in ATLA, and with the exception of the Avatar, people don't have access to memories from their past lives.

**If you have any questions or speculations about that section (or any part of the chapter) please don't hesitate to share them in review or via PM, and I will shed what light I can.**

**Promised myself I would never do this, but ... I also wanted to share my own "soundtrack" of sorts for the chapter, considering the atmosphere of the Spirit World and how difficult that can be to wrap your head around: Radiohead's Pyramid Song and, for Zuko's section particularly, Brian McFadden's Demons. Listened to both songs a lot while I was writing, and I thought it might enhance your reading to do the same. Plus, they are both great songs, so you should give them a listen if you haven't already.**

**So much insightful feedback last chapter, thank you all! This installment probably answered some of your questions and speculations; for those having to do with the situation between Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom, we will see it progress more in subsequent chapters. With some interesting repercussions from the coup...**

**The tale Azula spun for the bully novices was indeed dangerously close to the truth. And she might (MIGHT) be seeing some consequences sooner than you think. Azula was spotted en route to the Avatar Temple and probably too distracted to notice, maybe by the Ursa hallucination or some physical complaint. Specifically, she would have been spotted by one of Bumi's people with ties to Mai's family, from her father's governorship of Omashu. Perhaps hoping to take care of the problem without implicating their king, they passed on Azula's whereabouts to Tan's mistress, who passed it on to Tan and him to Mai.**

**Thanks as always to my dedicated beta reader, Meneldur, who had to endure Zuko's section without the benefit of helpful hints. For which hints, you can and should thank him. Also for chapter-improving input generally.**

**I think that was all; if I missed anything, expect to see it in the next few days. Getting tired and have an early start tomorrow (oh crap, TODAY) so think I'll publish and finally go to bed.**

**I hope you enjoyed, and hope equally much that you will leave a review. Please ;)**


	20. Distance

Iroh found them on the fifth day.

Katara and Aang had made camp for the night at the edge of some pines that crept nearly to shore, their needles whispering in the wind on one hand and waves lapping at the dark sands on the other. They were in Air Nomad territory, perhaps a day's ride from the North Pole, though Katara knew by now it would be more like two.

It turned out Mai got airsick, limiting how long they could spend flying in a day. Katara knew she and Aang did not look much better than the unhappy Fire Lady, with the hardships of living as fugitives and sleep lost. They had taken it in turns to watch Zuko, after he nearly died in his sleep their second night out from the capital.

Even Mai volunteered, surprising Katara. She didn't seem like one to give up her creature comforts lightly. But then, both hers and Zuko's lives had changed drastically in a short time.

Even with Katara's healing, his condition just kept getting worse. Zuko spent most of his day sleeping by now, and had little appetite for food. He needed help just to sit up, and was too weak to walk far even with assistance. He could never seem to get warm, and his hands shook uncontrollably sometimes. Drawn and hollow-eyed with grief, he spoke little, cried privately, and apologized every time one of them had to help him with basic tasks like feeding or dressing himself.

His embarassment was painful to watch, and undeserved. It just made Katara angrier when Mai withdrew and ignored him in his waking hours, even if she watched him obsessively while he slept. She still remembered the night she woke from what was supposed to be her watch, to find Mai sat beside his sleeping bag with what looked like a knife to his throat. Katara nearly sprang to snatch it away before she realized Mai held the shuriken under his nose instead, so his breath fogged the blade. The dark circles under her eyes were a silent reproach, when Mai flicked a dismissive glance her way.

She was losing sleep just to make sure he kept breathing, Katara realized slowly. But when he was _awake_ to see it, she wouldn't even look at him…

They had gotten into more than one argument about it, before Zuko begged them to stop. Aang barely seemed to notice. He was right there and might as well be a hundred miles away.

As soon as they entered Air Nomad lands, Aang had used his earthbending to erect what he called a tower of silence. Flat-roofed and circular, its rough parapet shielded Momo's burned body from view, when Aang laid the lemur to rest there.

He explained that his people had traditionally exposed their dead atop these towers to be picked clean by scavenging birds. Once the bones were bleached by the sun, Aang would come back and collect them to place in the ossuary pit. This was one custom Katara had never heard of, but the Air Nomads were wiped out decades before she was even born. She did remember seeing scattered piles of stone small enough to have formed these towers once, on peaks near the Air Temples.

It just made her angrier at the Fire Nation. It wasn't enough they killed Aang's people, they had to desecrate their burial grounds too? Now they rejected Zuko just for trying to keep peace in the world…

It was like they couldn't see one thing good or beautiful or even just different from them without trying to destroy it.

Between her own dark mood and growing sense of helplessness, Zuko's depression, Aang's distance, and Mai's — well, _Mai_ — Iroh arriving was a welcome relief. His steam-powered river boat touched down on the beach some distance from their camp in the twilight. It discharging the old general before chugging free, then turned back for the sleek Fire Nation ship waiting off-shore.

Appa lifted his head with a low groan where he lay nearby. This was more reaction than they'd got out of the bison in days, since Aang had to stop him guarding Momo's resting place and leaving offerings of food, as if this would wake his companion. Mai was off Spirits-knew-where, maybe using small animals for target practice. Aang helped Zuko stand up, at his uncle's emotional shout of "_Zuko!_" while Katara squinted at Iroh's approach. She realized with a shock that in five years of acquiantance, she had never seen him run.

He ran right past Katara and nearly bowled over his nephew when they collided in a flying hug. Iroh still hadn't let go when he managed to speak, as if afraid Zuko would vanish. "When I heard — _my gods_ —" he wept into his nephew's chest, while Zuko stumbled. "I **never** should have left…"

"I know why — you did," Zuko mumbled, ashamed, and hugged him back. "What I said to you — at dinner — it was —"

"No, Zuko…" Iroh drew back to beg off his apology, but Zuko clutched his elbows as if to steady himself, and insisted, "Unfair of me. I know how — you must've felt — when you found out." His good eye filled with tears. "The same way — I feel — when I think of it.

"I know — you only wanted — to spare me pain," Zuko spoke haltingly, his voice ragged. "You only — ever wanted to help me. Maybe — it didn't help _Azula_ — so much," he admitted, looking on his uncle with sadness, not blame. "But — you're trying now. That's what matters."

Iroh touched his chin with a watery smile, when Zuko glanced down. "There's so much — I have to ask — the way I've been — these past few months…" His tears fell when he looked to Iroh. "Uncle — I'm so sorry…"

Iroh obviously couldn't take any more, and embraced him again. "My _boy_, I would forgive you anything…"

But his mouth bent with shame when Zuko looked over Iroh's bald head. Katara followed his line of sight to find Mai standing at the edge of the trees, watching the exchange with hooded eyes, and none of the warmth or sympathy such a reunion warranted. Mai gripped the elbow of her soiled silk, lifting one white hand too late to hide her bitter quirk of the lips. Katara wondered just what her problem was.

"And Aang, Katara," Iroh spoke warmly, breaking from Zuko to hold out his callused hands to them, who crossed the brown sands to take one each. "I hear I have you to thank for saving his life." His lined face softened still more in the light of their cook fire. "How can I ever repay such a debt?"

"There're no debts between friends," Aang spoke solemnly, and Katara added. "I know you'd do the same for us." She glanced to Zuko and grasped his arm, as much for physical as emotional support. "And _have_."

"Mai found me," Zuko put in, glancing with regret to where she stood apart, the hand before her mouth clenched to a fist. "If she hadn't — dragged me to Aang — and Katara — they wouldn't have got there — in time."

"Oh! Thank you, Mai," Iroh raised his voice, but spoke courteously. "I didn't think —"

Mai didn't let him finish before she marched back into the trees, flashing an obscene gesture over her right shoulder. Iroh looked too shocked to take offense, while Aang just sighed. Zuko started, "She's taking it really hard — about Lu Ten."

"Don't make _excuses_ for her!" Katara burst out, incensed. _She's horrible_, was on the tip of her tongue, before Aang chided gently, "Katara." His eyes shadowed, unspeakably weary, it was his quiet reproach and the hint of hurt, even anger on Zuko's wan face that made her decision for her. Katara guessed they didn't need one more person dragging this mission down, and relented.

"Why don't we sit down to dinner?" she offered instead, steering an unsteady Zuko to one of the split logs arranged around their cook fire. "I'm making a stew."

Iroh and Aang joined the circle, and Katara bent some of the vegetable stew into Aang's bowl, before adding the remains of the rabbit they ate last night to heat. Iroh and Zuko were deep in conversation anyway, sat with their shoulders just touching.

"We'll get him back," Iroh said firmly, while Katara stirred the contents of the pot. "My people in the capital are doing all they can to track him —"

A shiver rippled through him; Zuko gripped his uncle's arm. "They don't _know_ — where he is?"

And Iroh shook his head. "The rebels have taken Prince Lu Ten from the palace. It is my understanding they move him often, to prevent anyone else capturing him."

And Zuko looked down, tears gathering in his good eye. "He must be — so _scared_," he whispered brokenly, the hand that gripped his uncle's arm shaking. "This is longer — than he's ever spent — apart from us…"

"There is no reason to think they would mistreat him," his uncle reassured. "Lu Ten is their sole claim to legitimacy. And the capital city prison is a highly defensible structure. They have already repulsed two attempts by the rebels to free Ozai."

Zuko looked about to choke on his own tongue, before Iroh added quickly, "He will never be freed. The prison can hold up under siege for some time, and those are good men, and loyal. The warden is an old comrade in arms, who served with me at Ba Sing Se."

Zuko nodded slowly, still downcast, while Katara bent the stew into two more bowls and dropped spoons in these to hand them to Iroh and Zuko. Uncle accepted his bowl with a smile of thanks, but Zuko's hands were shaking again, and she hesitated.

Zuko scowled and clenched his hands into shaking fists, until they stilled through apparent force of will. Katara handed him the bowl a little reluctantly when he glared at her in challenge. She went to get her own while Iroh kept talking.

"Do not lose heart, Zuko. You have more friends and loyal subjects in the Fire Nation than you know. I have already reached out to some of them." A sly smile touched his lips when Iroh started on the stew. "I'm surprised you didn't recognize the ship that brought me here." He gestured to it with his spoon, still moored some distance off-shore and visible now only for the lights along its deck. "You had it commissioned for an old friend upon his promotion."

And Zuko blinked, his own spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. "Lieut— _Captain_ Jee?" he corrected himself, and Iroh nodded.

"He and the men of his command have agreed to serve as your escort and honor guard while you travel. Whatever these rebels pretend, you are **still** the Fire Lord," Iroh reminded firmly. "And you must act as one."

A hopeful smile had just begun to break over his scarred face, when Zuko's hands started shaking again, and he spilled half his bowl down the front of his borrowed clothes. His reaction was immediate and shocking, after the past few days of hopeless depression.

"Gods _damn_ it!" He leapt to his feet with a thunderous curse, staggering even as he threw his bowl at the sands. Iroh jumped up to catch him before he could fall, though Zuko tried to push him away. "How am I supposed — to get my **son** or my throne back — when I'm a fucking _wreck?_"

"Zuko…" his uncle soothed, dragging him back down to his seat beside the fire.

"He's not even — two years old, and a _prisoner_," Zuko cried, clutching Iroh in desperation. "Mai's family —" Aang and Katara both stared, their own bowls forgotten while she recalled the hawk that reached them a few days ago from Mai's uncle, the warden of the Boiling Rock.

The old governor of Omashu, his wife and their young son were hostages for the warden's good behavior, placed under house arrest on the pretext that Mai was a traitor. She was just one of several suspects put forward by the rebels for the attempt on Zuko's life, along with Aang and Katara and even Iroh. Some even claimed Zuko tried to kill him_self_, distracting from the real culprits and justifying "emergency measures" designed to contain their political opponents…

"They could start — the war all over again!" Zuko raged helplessly. "Trying to bust — my father out of prison —"

"I told you that won't happen," Iroh reminded, looking like he regretted even mentioning it. "I would be more concerned if they got ahold of your _sister_. To put Azula on the throne would —" His uncle stopped when he noticed how still Zuko went, and let go when he sat back.

"There's something — I have to ask you." Zuko looked to where Mai had gone, as if afraid of being overheard. "When I was — dead," he didn't seem to notice Iroh flinch, "I saw things — in the Spirit World. Things I can't un-see." He squeezed his eyes shut with jaw clenched as if trying anyway. "Roku said — none of it was _real_, but —"

"Roku?" Aang spoke up, laying his bowl aside. "You talked to him?"

Zuko nodded reluctantly. "At least — I think it was him. He knew wha— _who_ I was. He said he talked — to Azula, too." He glanced to his uncle, who looked on Zuko in astonishment. "That must mean — she's in the Spirit World — right?"

Iroh didn't answer, but looked to Aang. "The only other way would be to talk to him through _me_, in the Avatar State," the airbender confirmed quietly, his eyes sad. "I'm sorry, Zuko."

"But — you went to the Spirit World — without _dying_ — didn't you?" Zuko asked Iroh a little desperately, and his uncle looked first surprised, then understanding.

"You think she may be dead?" Iroh asked him gently, and Zuko echoed, "Do _you?_"

Iroh stroked his beard thoughtfully. "I have heard nothing to indicate that," he cautioned. Katara thought privately that if the Earth Kingdom _had_ killed Azula, they'd be parading her head on a spike through the streets of Ba Sing Se by now. Unlike certain brothers suffering from foot-in-mouth disease though, she had the tact not to voice that in present company.

"Guys," Aang said slowly, his thin face lighting with a sudden idea, "maybe a spirit took her into the Spirit World. Hei Bai took Sokka," he exchanged a glance with Katara at the memory. "How did _you_ get into the Spirit World?" he asked Iroh, who shifted uncomfortably where he sat across the fire.

"The Moon Spirit," Iroh admitted, and looked with quiet amusement at his gaping nephew. "Why did you think I came home with gray hair?" he tried to joke, but it fell flat. "I wasn't even sixty yet."

"I thought — your son —" Zuko started, but Katara was already realizing, "_That's_ how you knew Yue was touched by the Moon Spirit!" Uncle nodded, clearly preferring to answer that speculation.

"If that's how Azula got into the Spirit World, she wouldn't reincarnate. She could still be there," Aang volunteered. "I could try to find her, talk to her —"

"Aang," Katara said tightly, reaching for his hand at the awful memory of him struck down by her lightning. Aang squeezed her fingers back in reassurance.

"She won't even be able to bend there," her husband said firmly. "She'll be completely out of her element … _literally_. Azula never struck me as a very spiritual person," Aang said with a rueful smile. "She might even be willing to compromise, if it means leaving the Spirit World.

"If not, it's likely she left her body behind." He glanced to Iroh, who nodded in confirmation. "If we could find her body before she leaves the Spirit World, we could capture her without a fight. This could actually be the best outcome for everyone," he spoke as if amazed at his own optimism, and Katara nodded permission at his questioning look. Better Aang should face Azula without her bending and where he held advantage, than at a time and place of her choosing.

"Could I come with you?" Zuko surprised them by speaking up, but Aang hesitated.

"Um, as bad a shape as you're in, I couldn't guarantee you'd come _back_…" he told a crestfallen Zuko, before Iroh watching his nephew volunteered, "I will go." Aang blinked at him in surprise. "If you will have me," the old general added modestly.

Aang considered him only a moment. "You've been to the Spirit World before." Iroh nodded confirmation. "Then … yeah, sure. I'd be happy to have you. I've never tried to take anyone with me into the Spirit World," he added doubtfully. "But maybe at the Spirit Oasis … maybe it could work."

Zuko was thanking his uncle. Aang didn't even glance at Katara before he started on his stew again, gray eyes narrowed in thought. He didn't ask her to come with them.

The possibility hadn't occurred to her until Zuko brought it up, but Aang could at least ask. _Seeing you would just set her off_, Katara told herself. But even if taking her wouldn't help, she didn't want Aang to go either, and she knew he was grieving, but didn't he realize how much she worried for him too?

"I'm going to find Mai before dinner gets cold," Katara announced, setting aside her bowl and standing to the stares and stunned silence of the men of the camp. Their surprise was a little insulting, but Zuko at least seemed grateful.

She didn't have to walk far into the trees, before the tell-tale _thunk_ of her knives hitting wood gave Mai away. Apparently, a few of them escaped her attack against the rebels for being strapped in less accessible places. Zuko had blushed when he admitted this, and Katara decided not to think too deeply into it.

Even hearing the knives hit was not enough to keep Katara from almost walking into the line of fire. She only stopped when she caught the glint of moonlight off a blade spinning past, to embed itself in the wood beside its fellows.

As usual, Mai betrayed no reaction to either her presence or the near possibility of skewering her. As usual, it was left to Katara to speak her purpose. "Dinner's ready. You should have some before it gets cold."

Mai strolled coolly over to retrieve her blades. "Your cooking sucks," she remarked with the barest hint of a smirk, yanking one of her knives from the trunk. She didn't even look at her, as if Katara were some servant beneath her notice. "Being fresh does nothing to improve that."

"Yeah, _well_," Katara crossed arms, fuming, "I know I'm not the palace kitchens, but at least I'm **contributing** to this mission!"

Mai just continued pocketing her knives, letting the charge dissipate to silence before she asked, "Is General Iroh still there?"

"_Yeah_," Katara drew the word out in appropriate answer to a stupid question. She was rewarded when Mai deigned to look at her in something vaguely like irritation. "He's Zuko's uncle." _I'm not even married to Zuko, and I call him 'Uncle'. All his friends do._

"They're _talking_. You know that thing you do, with people you love, when they need cheering up?" Katara pursued, but Mai just yanked her last blade free and turned back to camp with a quiet sigh. She walked right past Katara with no more reply than that, and finally, she couldn't take it anymore.

"Just _what_ is your problem?"

And she stopped, tensing square shoulders. The silence stretched before Mai spoke quietly, "I never thanked you." She turned back and faced Katara to clarify, "For saving his life."

_You still haven't_, Katara thought crossly, when the moment's surprise let her process those words. _You didn't thank_ Aang_ either_.

"Have you always been able to bend?" Mai asked quietly, producing one of her blades from concealment to pick dirt casually from beneath her cracked nails.

"For as long as I can remember." She didn't add that before she found a master, most of that bending was accidental and fueled by her emotions. Mai still wouldn't look at her.

"Was there a moment in your life," she said slowly, "when you felt completely helpless?"

Katara looked sharply at the question, to see her hands had stilled. _Zuko would want you to try with her_, she told herself, to stem the rush of suspicion. Aang_ would want you to try_. She stiffly replied, "The day the Fire Nation killed my mother."

Mai arched a brow in question, barely visible through the greasy hanks of her unwashed bangs. "The whole Fire Nation killed your mother?"

"The leader of the Southern Raiders," Katara bit out, "sent his men to make **war** on our village." Of course she couldn't expect the sympathy she found in Zuko when she shared this, Katara chided herself. Not from this woman who grew up with both parents at home and only hated them. Mai didn't bat an eye when she learned they were imprisoned…

"He broke into our home in the fighting," Katara kept telling it though she hardly knew why, fists clenched shaking at her sides. "Demanded my mom tell him who was the last waterbender. She lied and said it was _her_, to protect me and the village."

Katara pressed lips tightly together, and drew a deep breath against the tears that burned her eyes. "He killed her for that lie."

But Mai watched her with brows furrowed, and simply asked, "How did he know to look for you?"

"What?"

"You weren't occupied territory. The last waterbenders were s'posed to be captured decades ago," Mai dryly explained. "You live at the gods' end of the earth. Who would see you waterbend?"

Katara exhaled like she'd been punched in the gut. She remembered Yon Rha's account, words she was too blindly furious to register at the time. _My source says there's one waterbender left in the Southern Tribe_…

Who would see her waterbend? Her friends and neighbors. Those familiar faces who smiled and greeted and thanked her, who fished beside her and shared table with her, who laughed and danced and told stories —

"How _dare_ you?" she choked out, and Mai just blinked. "I share the **worst** moment of my life with you, and you trot out _conspiracy theories?_" Katara spoke with disgust. "Most people would say 'that's awful' or 'I'm sorry' or —"

"I'm not most people," Mai flatly preempted her, running one thin finger along the edge of her blade. "And what good would that do? You _know_ it was awful. You know I'm not sorry. I barely know you." She shrugged with that monstrous indifference. "And don't much like you."

"You're a _terrible_ person!" Katara burst out, her voice cracking, and Mai actually rolled her eyes.

"For what? Not telling the comfortable lie?" She tilted her head to step closer. "You asked a question. I gave an honest answer. I'm Zuko's spymaster." She held the blade close to her heart. "I deal in information —"

"I guess you weren't any **good**, if you could let this happen!" Katara threw an arm out the way she came, but Mai just considered her coldly.

"Fuck you." She turned back for the camp.

Katara should have let her go. She should have let it go. But she felt like there was this hole in her heart that she never knew was there, until _Mai_ stuck a knife in it. "She lied to keep me safe, she **died** to keep me safe!" Katara insisted, walking fast after her.

"That _already_ makes her a better mother than **you!**"

"Does it?" Mai cast a sharp glance over her right shoulder. "Where was she the _next_ time you needed her?"

Katara didn't think. Tears sprang to her eyes and a cry of outrage to her lips, when she bent the water from her pouch. The focused jet would have knocked Mai off her feet, if the knife-wielder didn't dodge with surprising swiftness. Katara whipped the water around, but her attack was broken when Mai twisted an arm behind her back — and the cold touch of steel kissed her neck.

"Careful," Mai hissed behind her, while Katara breathed hard, fighting more tears. Her grip and position held Katara off-balance, she could barely keep from tripping, let alone break free. "You may not _feel_ helpless, but you're not invincible either.

"You're not so different from the firebenders who use **hate** and anger to fuel their bending," Mai whispered harshly, withdrawing the blade. "Your emotions don't just make you strong. They make you weak." Mai dropped her to the dirt with ease, and stepped away.

"Next time, send someone else to get me."

Katara landed on her hip and hugged herself around the middle. The anger drained from her with the adrenaline, and a grief she'd half-forgotten welled up to take its place. When Mai walked away, Katara saw her mother's back instead, turned to her in the Foggy Swamp. She remembered running to her with tears in her eyes, only to reveal a cruel illusion.

What would Katara have seen if she reached — _it?_ If the image turned around? Would there be nothing in place of a face she could barely remember? Would Mom look like she did when they found her that morning, when Dad didn't move fast enough to keep her from seeing —

_Where was she the next time you needed her?_

Katara huddled beneath a moon nearing full, and cried for something she lost a long time ago.

* * *

When Aang found Katara sat crying in the dirt where Mai had left her, puffy-eyed and barely intelligible, his anger was terrible to behold. They were probably all lucky he didn't bend at Mai, before he finished up shouting to expel her from camp.

Zuko went with Mai, of course; so did Iroh. But he wished he had a chance to apologize to Katara, who stood red-eyed and silent at the treeline until they left, glaring hatred at Mai. He didn't know why they kept getting into it lately, but it certainly looked like Katara got the worse end of this encounter. He guessed she had Aang to talk to, at least. That left him to try to talk things out with Mai.

She proved as reticent as he might expect, barely reacting to the news Iroh had related, and Zuko shared with her while they were moved aboard Jee's ship. She wouldn't talk about the fight or what she did to Katara, besides simply to say, "I told her the truth."

"About _what?_" Zuko had asked her, bewildered. And his wife muttered, "Herself."

Mai took up station in a chair beside, while Iroh helped Zuko to bed in the ship's infirmary. Its glass lamps were dimmed for the night, and the sounds and scent of the ocean filled the cabin from a narrow porthole. His uncle had glanced uncomfortably between him and Mai, before volunteering that if it was all the same to them, he would sleep here tonight too. Mai just blinked once and glanced away, disinterested, so Zuko agreed.

He didn't know what he could say to her, anyway. Mai shut him down every time he tried to talk, when she didn't just find someplace else to be. Zuko could barely look her in the face, when he thought of everything he cost them, the mistakes he just kept making.

She deserved so much better, and their son… It ached just to think of him.

Mai was draped in a blanket and looking anywhere but at Zuko, when he drifted off to Iroh's snores from the next bed. She still sat in the same attitude when he woke, dark circles drawn even more starkly beneath her gray-gold eyes in daylight. Zuko watched her with concern.

"Did you — sleep?" he rasped weakly, feeling worse as he always did now, mornings.

"When Iroh woke up." She looked to him without surprise. "He wanted to talk to you. I'll get him."

Zuko moved to stop her, almost asked her to stay — but Mai was already halfway to the door. A guard stationed outside peered briefly in at Zuko when she left, his face concealed behind the skull mask they all wore. Zuko realized he could feel and hear the ship moving in the silence of the empty cabin, guessed that Aang and Katara were probably following them on Appa.

He reached for the blanket Mai left draped over her chair. It still smelled like her.

Zuko had managed to sit up in bed by the time Iroh's smiling face appeared in his door. "We're moving?" he asked while his uncle took a seat in Mai's chair, and Iroh nodded.

"We are making full-speed for the North Pole. Katara is on deck helping monitor for icebergs," he added absently, rubbing at his knee like it bothered him. "I went ashore and talked to them this morning. They have brought the bison on board to let it rest." Iroh grimaced. "They seemed better, but … I would keep those two apart, if you can."

Zuko didn't need to ask who he meant. "I don't think — that'll be a problem."

"There is one more thing. I forgot to mention it in the commotion, but we have another passenger." Zuko blinked. "You may remember him, Dr. Kwan?"

"Who?"

His uncle gave a look of distaste. "Azula's psychiatrist, from the asylum on Ember Island."

"_How_ —" Zuko started, brow knit with consternation. Of all the people to show up here…

"Perhaps I should let him tell it," Iroh sighed. "We put him in a cabin on the upper deck, kept him comfortable but under guard. I thought you should decide what to do with him. Apparently, he wishes to offer you his services."

"What?!" Zuko jumped, but Uncle just shook his head. "As I said, I should let him tell it. He did suggest you might walk better with a cane," Iroh withdrew a plain but sturdy one from where it sat propped out of sight behind the nightstand, "until you regain your strength."

He sobered when he saw how Zuko held back. "It would be best if you are able to stand by yourself, for our entrance into the city," his uncle explained gently. "This is your first visit to the Tribe since you were crowned Fire Lord. And before —"

"I know." Zuko took the implement from his hands.

It took some getting used to, and Zuko needed his uncle's arm more than he would like to admit. But the long walk to the upper tiers, which housed guest cabins and the captain's quarters which Jee first offered him, gave Zuko ample practice with the cane.

One of two navy guards standing outside his door admitted them to the doctor's quarters. Zuko entered to find them almost identical to his own, steel-plated and lamplit, though this cabin lacked a porthole. It had been long enough since he was on a ship that Zuko almost forgot how every part of it looked alike.

Kwan too looked almost identical to the last time Zuko had seen him, the night of Azula's escape. His gold physician's robes were rumpled as his graying hair. He stood immediately on Zuko's entrance, and dropped to his knees in a low bow.

"Fire Lord," Kwan spoke to the floor, still prostrate in greeting. "You honor me with your presence."

"Please stand." Zuko leaned heavily on his cane, exhausted from that very effort. "There's no need for that here."

The doctor nodded and climbed to his feet, abashed. "I apologize for my appearance, Lord Zuko. But I don't like being kept idle." He gestured helplessly to the cabin around him. Zuko could understand the sentiment, and hardly criticize in that regard. Though the crew had issued him fresh clothes, a day's growth of stubble still shadowed his jaw, and his hair hung limp and stringy around his shoulders.

"Why have — you come?"

The doctor glanced to Iroh in surprise, but Uncle just arched his eyebrows, noncommittal. "I was fleeing a summons from the capital," Kwan explained. "Really, fleeing the guards who delivered it. I escaped with little more than the clothes on my back."

"Why did you run?" Zuko asked, and the doctor looked at him in disbelief.

"I have friends in Caldera, who wrote me of your overthrow. Sire, it is widely rumored the rebels mean to place your _sister_ on the throne. However good your intentions in assigning the princess to my care or mine in treating her, I did effectively **imprison** her on your orders." The doctor grimaced. "Do you think she would be likely to forgive?"

"No," Zuko admitted quietly, thinking of his own situation with Azula. "She wouldn't."

"Depending on her mental state, the rebels might even expect me to keep her drugged and compliant for their purposes," Kwan spoke darkly, almost to himself. "It would be a violation of my oath to do no harm, besides my oath to you as Fire Lord. I could not bear it.

"At first I didn't think of finding you," he admitted. "No one knew your whereabouts; it was even whispered you were dead. But luckily, I ran across some friends of General Iroh." Zuko shared a glance with his uncle which confirmed his suspicion. _The Order_. "They brought me here, where I could wait your arrival so —" he stopped, suddenly nervous "— so I might ask you for asylum."

"You have it," Zuko simply replied, and the doctor glanced up in relief. This was clearly not a man accustomed to begging.

"I am grateful," he spoke with a short bow and flame salute. "And please let me reassure you, as I reassured your uncle," Kwan here shot a reproachful look at Iroh, "that your sister was never mistreated at the asylum."

Zuko glanced to Uncle in surprise, who watched the graying doctor with a hard look on his lined face that said Iroh had questioned Kwan about this more than once. "There are strict protocols in place to prevent abuse, and no staff member is ever alone with a patient," Kwan was saying. "If the princess was found injured after her escape, it was not by my hand or any of my staff —"

"I believe you," Zuko said quickly, knowing well enough who hurt Azula. If Uncle was questioning him about it, that had to be soon after her escape, the mysterious letter which first took Iroh from the palace. Information his uncle still hadn't shared…

_You're not in any position to judge_, Zuko thought reluctantly, fidgeting when Iroh turned a searching gaze on him. He cleared his throat, quickly changed the subject. "My uncle said — you wanted to work — for me?"

Kwan nodded. "You may not be aware that before I became a doctor of the _mind_," he tapped two fingers to his temple in illustration, "I was an army physician. I — believe you still suffer some ill effects from the attempt on your life?" Zuko scowled at him, wondering how much he'd heard, but the doctor persisted, "I could attend you, and aid your rehabilitation. A ship this small isn't staffed with a full-time physician, and —" he hesitated. "Forgive me, my Lord, but … I understand your royal physician perished in the coup."

Zuko looked down, his mouth set in a hard line. The man had delivered his son. Zuko owed him better than a violent end. He knew from the Warden's letter that his captain of the guard was also killed. All those months Zuko spent feeling alone and beset by enemies, and there were loyal men around him. How many of them still breathed?

Now this guy wanted to work for him? Well, Zuko guessed he didn't have a lot of other options. "I'd be glad — for your service," Zuko sighed, trusting Iroh to contradict him if it was the wrong choice, but his uncle said nothing. "I'll send for you — when I need you," he took his leave, and linked arms with Iroh to stump from the room.

"I'm surprised — you put him — under guard," Zuko huffed, while Iroh helped him to the mess hall for some breakfast. "He seems — harmless."

"The hidden threat is always the most dire," Iroh insisted, lifting a finger for emphasis. "After what happened with — your chamberlain," he wouldn't even say his name, "I am not taking any chances. Poisoning _tea_," his uncle muttered with disgust. "What a despicable villain!"

And Zuko couldn't help a rueful smile. Only Iroh would fixate on that.

The rest of the day passed in comfortable routine: eating, napping, washing up, cleaning up, napping some more. If he had not exchanged firebending for the less rewarding goal of walking under his own power, Zuko could almost believe he was banished to the high seas again.

It was a depressing thought, and he tried not to dwell on it. It became pretty much impossible _not_ to dwell on it, when Aang came below decks to tell Zuko they arrived at the Northern Water Tribe. Zuko struggled to lever himself out of his chair with the cane. Kwan bustled about packing up supplies he might need onshore, looking much the happier of the two of them for the hour he spent with Zuko in physical therapy.

"Listen," Aang started awkwardly, taller than Zuko by now and still rubbing the back of his bald head like the kid expecting a lecture, "I'm sorry I yelled last night, and kicked you out of camp — well, really just Mai, but then you and Iroh had to go with her and that's just as bad —"

"Aang," Zuko flatly interjected, before the airbender could really get going. He had a motormouth that did credit to his element. "It's fine. Even when — you're angry — you're never cruel."

His friend still looked uncomfortable. "I tried to be tolerant with Mai," Aang fretted on their way up to the deck, past guards who stood straight and inscrutable outside the infirmary door. "Everyone grieves in different ways, you know?" He didn't seem to notice Zuko flinch behind him. "But when I saw Katara crying like that," his voice went a shade darker at the memory, "I just lost it."

"How is she?" Zuko asked soberly. His voice echoed down the steel-plated hall.

Aang drew a deep breath. "Better," he ventured, slowing to let Zuko catch up, "but still quiet. She won't tell me why she was crying. Has Mai said —"

"Are you kidding?" Zuko glanced away. "She doesn't talk — to me about anything — anymore."

"Sorry, Zuko." Aang patted his arm. "Maybe she just needs some time."

_She's had sixteen weeks_. Zuko had taken to counting them, since he found out Azula was pregnant…

She would be showing by now, he realized with a start. If — if she kept it. If she even could. He remembered his own eyes look back at him from a dragon's form. Wings, claws and horns that tore her to pieces. The significance was painfully clear. A dragon was meant to be hatched, not borne. The shell had to break before it drew its first breath.

She could die for what he did.

"Are you okay?" Aang broke his reverie. "You … kinda look like you're gonna be sick."

Zuko shook his head. "I just want — to get this — over with," he lied, gritting his teeth at the shooting pains in his joints when they climbed the stairs, the hammering of his heart in protest, the burning of lungs that couldn't draw breath enough for such a basic task. He'd done this more than once today. He did it a few too many times, apparently. He felt lightheaded before he gained the deck and accepted Aang's help the rest of the way.

"Katara's gone ahead with Iroh, to meet the scout ships outside the city," Aang was saying, hauling Zuko out on deck. "You, uh, _really_ don't want the same welcome we got, when we first came here on Appa…"

He looked around for Mai in the twilight, dotted with icebergs out to the darkening horizon, and broken by a vast wall of white bearing the symbol of the Water Tribes to their north. Jee lined up his soldiers and crew in orderly rows for last minute inspections, and the doctor emerged behind them, bags packed and blinking curiously.

His wife stood at the rail, and Zuko left Aang to join her there. She wore her freshly washed hair down, tucked into the fur-lined hood of the same standard issue, Fire Navy parka Zuko wore. She didn't greet Zuko or even look at him, just watched with him as the modest catamarans pulled near their port side, propelled by waterbending. This was less impressive than when a round dozen Tribesmen shot up to deck level on columns of bent water, stepping onboard with bundles of clothes in their arms.

Zuko could feel the tension on deck at the nonchalance with which they boarded. He made a quelling gesture with his hand. Appa flew up behind the waterbenders and touched down on deck to discharge his uncle and Katara, while a Tribesman stepped forward. His full beard was crusted with ice. "Fire Lord Zuko, well met!"

He shifted the bundled parkas under one elbow to clasp Zuko's forearm in the traditional Water Tribe greeting, and Zuko echoed him. "We got your captain's letter. Chief Arnook is expecting you."

Seeing Zuko's surprise — he thought the messenger hawk had died when it never came back — the man added drolly, "I hope you don't mind we put him up in the royal menagerie. An animal that delicate doesn't weather these latitudes well.

"Now, you are welcome to the city," the Tribesman plowed ahead before Zuko could even thank him, "but the chief has two conditions."

"Name them," Zuko spoke flatly.

"First, you must enter the city on our boats or the bison," he gestured to Appa, who acknowledged the attention with a toss of his horned head. "Our canals are not big enough to support a ship this size."

"We have a smaller boat in the hold," Zuko put forward, but the bearded Tribesman shook his head. "This is not negotiable."

"What else?"

"Your men can't wear their armor within the city walls. We've brought parkas; I think you'll find them much better suited to the climate." Zuko could practically feel Jee scowling at that. He wasn't the only hand on board to have barely survived the Siege of the North, and now they proposed to strip him of his ship and armor?

Rightly interpreting his silence, the Tribesman explained, "Our people have long memories, especially where the Fire Nation is concerned. The chief would like to avoid inflaming old prejudices."

Mai leaned close to press a light kiss to his burnt ear, and Zuko looked at her in shock. "You're lucky he'll let you bring troops in at all," Mai whispered under cover of the kiss. "Accept his terms."

"We accept," Zuko spoke loudly, looking hard at Jee to communicate the message. The gray-haired captain might be sucking on a lemon, so sour was his expression. But he set the example for the rest of his crew by removing his chestplate and shoulderguards. The other Tribesmen stepped forward to help outfit those crew not staying aboard, for their entrance into the city.

"Please thank Chief Arnook for his hospitality," Zuko said stiffly, but the Tribesman contradicted, "You can thank him yourself. He'll greet you at the palace plaza." And he handed off parkas to Zuko and Mai, who exchanged them for their own and climbed aboard Appa with Iroh, Aang, and Katara, while Jee and his men descended rope ladders to the boats waiting below.

* * *

Their entrance to the city was a trial. The locks and canals were a minor wonder, but Zuko could neither appreciate them nor take offense at the people's lukewarm greeting. Dusky faces framed with fur watched from every balcony, the tops of buildings, and bridges, but no one stood at canal level when the bison paddled by. Only the youngest children waved or shouted greetings to even Aang and Katara, stood to his left — and their parents quickly stifled them.

Sweat poured down his face from the mere effort of standing in the howdah, chilling Zuko even worse than the arctic air. He felt like he would faint or throw up until Mai appeared at his side to link arms with him, taking the cane from his hands. "Don't look up," she sighed.

"Why? What's happening?" Zuko quickly scanned the passing ledges and balconies above. He swayed on his feet when a fresh wave of dizziness hit until Mai propped him up, taking his weight.

"You're making your vertigo worse," she dryly explained, "'cause you keep looking up when I said don't look up. Focus on a stationary point, like the horn of Appa's saddle."

Zuko stared hard at it, and was heartened when his head cleared a little. "How did you — know that?" Zuko glanced quickly over, before Mai steered his chin back to keep looking at the horn.

"I got a lot of ear infections as a kid," she sighed. "And I still get motion sickness. Just keep staring straight ahead. You can put on your politician face when we meet Arnook."

"I don't have a politician face," Zuko mumbled, careful not to look at her this time. And his wife replied, "You might want to work on that."

By the time they reached the end of the canals and the highest tier of the city, full dark had fallen, and Zuko was glad he chose to ride in on Appa. The bison lifted off dripping wet from the canal and simply airbent them up and over three waterfalls, to land between the ice-carved totems and reflecting pools that marked the palace plaza. By contrast, Zuko's guards and the doctor would have to climb switchback stairs carved into the sheer drops beside.

The chief waited to greet them at the foot of the palace stairs, accompanied by a stern woman clothed in what looked like spun silver. They were both flanked by a small complement of servants, but Zuko only had eyes for the stairs. Two long flights of them reinforced with whalebone, one to climb the waterfalls that streamed down from the moat, another to reach the palace proper. If Arnook saw how Zuko deflated at the sight, he kindly made no comment.

"Fire Lord Zuko," the chief spoke solemnly when they approached, bowing from the waist with his hands held fist to palm. Level, as to an equal. "I was sorry to hear of the unrest in your country, and that you were separated from your son." The words were a fresh blow even spoken in comfort. Arnook added gently, "There can be no keener pain for any parent."

"I will pray to the Moon Spirit for his safe return," Arnook's braided companion spoke up, hands folded in front of her flowing robes as if already in prayer — and Zuko felt Mai tense beside him. A handsome woman, the severity of her features recalled Mai to him. Her thin face also tapered to a narrow jaw, though her eyes were an ice-gray so light they bordered on uncanny.

"My honored guests, please meet our High Priestess of Tui," Arnook introduced her belatedly, with the barest of pauses, "and my wife."

Zuko blinked, probably rather stupidly, but found he was the only one who looked surprised. Uncle remembered their manners and acknowledged her, while Mai spoke low out the side her mouth, "Married three years, can you _try_ to remember these things?"

It wasn't like he was invited to the wedding, Zuko thought a little crossly, leaning heavily on his cane to run a hand down his face. At least his hands had stopped shaking since they gave him a mild sedative on board the ship. But every muscle in his body still ached with fatigue, and he had been carried most of the way through the city. There was no way he could climb those steps…

"General Iroh," Arnook greeted him in turn, "it's been almost ten years, hasn't it?"

"Eleven," his uncle spoke with hands clasped, unusually circumspect.

"Master Pakku always spoke highly of you," the chief observed. "And you actions at the siege proved you a friend to the spirits. You are most welcome here.

"Avatar Aang. Our sister," he acknowledged Katara, then Mai, "honored Lady.

"Fire Lord," the chief seemed to notice him sway on his feet for the first time, "we took the liberty of preparing you a simple litter." He lifted his hands to clap twice, and the servants to his right stood aside to reveal a sturdy wooden armchair, richly carved with wood rails fixed to brackets on either side of the seat. Two bearers in fur-trimmed tunics deposited this beside Zuko in the snow, while Aang and Katara moved to make room.

"My servants are at your disposal, any time you might need their escort," Arnook offered, while Zuko walked slowly around the wood rails to slump into the offered seat. "_Thank you_," he sighed in audible relief, looking to Arnook with a new appreciation. "This is — most kind."

"The Water Tribes value family," Arnook simply replied. "We know how to make our guests feel at home."

"The chief has prepared you all rooms in the palace," the priestess added, "for your comfort and security." And Zuko hesitated, struck by a sudden concern, "Actually, my wife needs —"

"No," Mai flatly preempted him, "I don't." Zuko stared, and Mai blushed angrily when all their eyes fixed on her. An uncomfortable silence just settled before she whispered low, "If you think I'm letting you sleep _alone_ after what almost —" She stopped and bit her lip, glancing away.

Zuko looked up at her first in amazement, then understanding. The dark circles under her eyes, how many times he woke to find her near these past few days… He had not seen her sleep once in that time. Her gloved hand jumped in his when Zuko made to hold it, but Mai didn't pull away. She wouldn't, in front of his friends and the chief.

"Chief Arnook," Katara spoke up quickly beside them. "Could we ask one more favor? I — _we_ wondered if Zuko could be healed at the Spirit Oasis?"

The priestess went rigid at her suggestion, and Arnook pointed out, "We have already offered the services of our best healers."

"I know, and — thank you," even Katara faltered a little at the cold reception. "But time is really pressing, and it would be faster. Yue told us how the Moon Spirit healed her —"

The chief held up a hand to stop Katara. His wife knew a moment's satisfaction before Arnook paused at the mention of his late daughter, and seemed to reconsider. "You may try," he said cryptically, at last. "At the next full moon, tomorrow night."

"Husband," the priestess started, but Arnook cut her off, "I have spoken."

"Um," Aang spoke up too, at a glance from Zuko, "I wondered if I could use the Spirit Oasis, too? To get into the Spirit World? With Iroh," he added.

The priestess pursed her lips in plain disapproval, but Arnook just blinked. "After your great service to our Tribe, I wouldn't refuse you," he stated simply, gesturing his invitation to the white cliffs behind the seven-tiered palace.

"We could go tonight," Aang offered to Zuko. "Was there anything you wanted us to say to Azula?"

_Dammit_. Zuko resisted the urge to facepalm only by reminding himself he hadn't exactly mentioned to Aang not to mention Azula. The airbender already cringed at the look Arnook turned on him, realizing his mistake. Mai just pulled away from Zuko, staring at him in mild disbelief.

"I think that — my sister," he explained to Arnook, for that would surely be easier than explaining to Mai, "might be — in the Spirit World. Aang volunteered — to try to find her, and talk to her."

He chanced a glance up at Mai, whose furrowed brow clearly stated, _Why bother?_ It couldn't be more obvious she had zero faith in this plan — or maybe just zero faith in him.

"Are you saying she's deceased?" the chief asked, while his wife looked on with a level of disinterest that suggested she didn't even know who Azula was. Zuko sighed and laid the cane across his lap. "I hope not."

"You don't think to bring her _here_," Arnook stated more than asked. Zuko exchanged a look with Aang, the same question written on both their faces. Was that even possible? "If the princess sets foot in Water Tribe territory, we must surrender her for execution of her sentence."

"What?" Aang cried at the same time as Zuko, looking almost as surprised as he felt. "How could — you agree — to that?" Zuko demanded, and the chief gave him a chilly look.

"The same way you agreed to it, at the outset of trials. By signing the treaty for extradition of war criminals —"

"She's _not_ a war criminal!" Zuko hotly insisted. Mai just turned away, looking out over the moonlit city behind with back straight and arms folded.

"She has been so adjudged," the chief spoke gravely, but Zuko was already arguing, "Half the charges — against her were _invented!_ Her trial was — a sham —"

"Why do you seek to convince me?" Arnook interrupted, almost weary. "I didn't rule against her."

And Zuko stopped, stunned. "But — you agree with me," he spoke slowly. He could see it in his lined face. "It was unjust. Then why —"

"Because there is a principle at stake here, greater than any individual concern. War has plagued our world from its beginning, but this tribunal is the first of its kind," Arnook explained, while the silver priestess looked almost reverently to him. "Heads of state were not asked to sit it for a reason. No justice may come from such a conflict of interest."

"Mine is the _only_ — conflict of interest!" Zuko read between the lines. "When only **Fire** Nation — are being tried!" He sat forward in his chair, ignoring how even Aang did not add his voice in support, the disappointed look his uncle gave him, that Mai still wouldn't look at him…

It just made him angrier, and he directed that anger at the old chief. "You wouldn't be — so cavalier if it was — someone you loved —"

"Enough," Arnook spoke with a quiet power he envied. Zuko could shout that from his own throne seat and not get half the result. The priestess and his palace servants looked down on Zuko with equal coldness.

"You took no interest in proceedings until you had a personal stake in them. And four years later, you wish to complain?" Arnook rebuked him. "These are not the actions of a responsible leader. If you would rule the lives of men, you cannot be ruled by your own heart. My _daughter_ learned that lesson early." His blue eyes grew dark with bitterness before Zuko realized his misstep. "And better than you, it seems.

"Now," the chief took his leave, "the hour grows late, and I would see you settled in your rooms. Good evening." He barely lifted his hand in parting before sweeping with the priestess and half the servants assembled up the icy steps to the palace. The stair was long, and it would have been an awkward exit for anyone else. But Zuko was starting to realize the chief was fundamentally incapable of awkwardness.

"How could you be so rude?" Iroh spoke quietly beside his chair, while the servants in blue tunics pretended not to listen. "He is your host. He was under no obligation to receive you at all, under the circumstances."

Zuko stared down at the snow blowing over his boots and the legs of his chair, too abashed to meet his eyes or look to Aang and Katara, when he embarrassed them too. Or to Mai, stood silent and rigid behind him. "What did you hope to accomplish?" Uncle sighed, but laid a warm hand on his back. Zuko slumped shoulders beneath the friendly weight, weary in a way that went beyond any physical injury. "His hands are tied by that treaty as much as yours."

"I know," he could admit now. "I just — hate that everyone's against her. I hate that —" tears stung his eye, "I didn't do anything for her — until it was too late."

"It may not be too late," Aang encouraged, somehow less encouraging with the mark of grief fresh on his own face. "We could still find her in time." Katara crossed arms beside him as if against the cold.

"If we do," his uncle spoke gravely, looking as if he didn't relish the prospect, "what message would you give to Azula?"

Zuko glanced down again, acutely aware of Mai listening intently. He would never be able to say what he needed if he had to worry about her reaction…

"Tell her, I'm sor—" He stopped, realizing how inadequate that apology would be coming from anyone but him. Even coming from him. "Tell her, I want to help and — I'm ready to listen and — and we'll figure something out, just —" He closed his eyes to grip the arms of his chair.

"Tell her, please come home."

The crunch of snow was his only warning when Mai walked away, past him and up the stairs. Two servants scrambled to escort her, and his friends and uncle looked after Mai in surprise and disappointment. Zuko just bent his head, and let out a long breath that fogged the air.

* * *

"I was — going to tell you."

Mai's silence was chilly as the darkened suite Arnook granted them in his palace of ice. She lay with her back to Zuko on the far side of a great bed piled with fur pelts, one of several probably priceless articles of furniture carved of the scarce wood to be found this far north. But he could tell she wasn't asleep, still wearing her borrowed parka and lying on top of the furs.

It was freezing in here, with only dark curtains to insulate the arches that opened on their balcony and the arctic air. The white wall behind their bed was hung with traditional Water Tribe weapons, but besides the spear, Zuko could only name the ones he saw Sokka carry. A carved frieze ran along the ceiling, and rugs woven with muted blues, grays and purples covered much of the floor.

He pulled off his boots and laid the cane down beside them, and padded over to sit beside Mai, slumping with exhaustion but surer of foot after Katara dragged him to a session with the chief healer, Yugoda. The gray old waterbender had explained that healing drew upon a patient's own _chi_, and this would limit his progress in any one session.

They would probably be here awhile — _Too long_, his mind whispered. It would feel even longer, if he couldn't get his wife to talk to him. Zuko sighed.

"I just talked to Aang — about it last night," he tried to explain, touching her shoulder. "He thought this — could be a way to bring Azula in — peacefully."

Mai sat straight abruptly and shrugged him off. The dark curtain of her hair hid her face from him. "And what's your plan," she spoke low at last, "to get our _son_ back?"

Zuko flinched at her twist of the knife. "You know I can't talk — about that," he said tightly, and Mai glared reproach over one shoulder at him. "Can't? Or won't?"

"I still can't — even climb a flight of _steps!_" Zuko hissed, his face burning with shame. "How am I supposed — to **fight** this?"

"You're not," she spoke with eyes flashing, and turned to face him on their bed with one leg folded. "So why are your friends looking for _Azula_ instead of your helpless son?"

"I can _send_ Aang and Uncle — into the Spirit World," Zuko argued, his fingers clenching in the furs, "I **can't** send them — into the Fire Nation! They're war heroes — everyone knows their faces. They wouldn't get within — a mile of him!"

He stopped when Mai bent her head and bit her lip, and softened. "Why are you being — like this?"

"Why aren't you?" Mai looked up in disbelief, sat opposite him with shoulders rounded. "_Your son is gone!_" her voice broke. "Left in the hands of people who tried to **kill** you, and all you can think to say is, come home _Azula?_" Her mouth twisted with disgust.

"Come home to _what?_ To _sit_ on your throne, to **murder** your son?" Mai demanded in outrage and Zuko stared, taken aback. "Come home to **what**, Zuko? _You're_ not even home!"

"That won't happen," he tried to reassure, and reached to hold her shaking hands. "She doesn't _know_ — about the coup. Uncle won't tell her." He would know better than that, even if Zuko hadn't thought of it. "And how would the rebels — even **find** Azula? No one knows — where she is…"

Mai pulled away, half-turning on her knees to look the length of their bed, eyes tearing and brows drawn with anguish. One hand clapped over her mouth as if holding back some unspeakable truth. When she spoke from behind bent fingers, her low voice rang with grief, "But you said, she _threatened_ him…"

And Zuko shrank with shame at the memory of that first argument, the empty justifications he tried to make for something he knew now could never be justified. "I don't think she meant —"

"You _never_ think she means it!" his wife turned on him with shocking swiftness. "She never means it 'til she **does**, and you're lying there struck by her lightning!" She thrust the heel of her hand hard into the scar Zuko still bore from their Agni Kai. "_What_ would've happened if Katara wasn't there? Or this last time —"

"Mai," he gasped, still bent from her blow. The scar hadn't pained him for years, but of course it hurt now, everything did. "You're scared and gods know — I am too but — Azula didn't do this." She looked away in mute fury, but Zuko insisted, "She isn't the enemy. What reason — would she have — to hurt Lu Ten?"

Until Mai finally broke, "She'll want **her** son to sit the throne, _not_ mine!"

And Zuko stopped, stricken. Tears started to his eye. He started, "Mai —"

"Why didn't you just **kill** her when you had the chance?" Mai glared right at him in challenge, white hands laid helplessly palms up on her knees, and Zuko froze. "I could almost _forgive_ what you did," she spoke slowly through clenched teeth, her fingers clenched. The look on her face was terrible. "If you just had the sense to **end** it then."

Zuko's mouth dropped open in shock. He couldn't touch her or even speak a word of comfort, when Mai turned away as if ashamed to lie down with her back to him. She curled up with hands braced behind her neck, and he could tell from how she breathed that she was crying.

She didn't take it back.

It was all he could manage to lie down beside her after that, staring up at the ceiling in mute horror. Mai was close enough to touch, their heads laid on the same bolster that ran the length of the carved headboard. But they might as well be worlds apart.

That Mai could say something like that, that she could even _think_ it… _You _did _something like that_. He forced himself to recall his dying dream, the pearl dagger, his unrepentant sister, her blood smeared on the tiles beneath his royal portrait.

Were they really so different? _You're the reason she's like this_. Mai wouldn't have to say these things or even think them, if he hadn't done what he did…

His wife spoke into the dark, voice muffled by tears and her pillow, "Sometimes I hate you."

His mouth bent with misery, and Zuko closed his eyes. He rolled to lay facing away from her, his head tucked into their pillow.

He whispered, "I don't hate you."

* * *

**VERY sorry for the wait, especially to those readers who might have worried no update was coming. I have planned _Dominion_ out to its end, and have discussed those plans with my beta reader. The problem this chapter was mostly with unfamiliar locations (Air Nomad territories, NWT, Spirit World...) and pacing issues. I originally switched off between Zuko and Azula each section, as is my standard.**

**But I finally realized the chapter was going to be way too long (seriously even longer than the last two) if I wanted to bring them both to where I planned. Azula's sections in particular would lose something in continuity if I just published what I had so far, and split the chapter in two. So I've moved Azula's Spirit World storyline to the next chapter, where Aang and Iroh's journey could(?) intersect with hers. And a certain breakthrough re:Maiko will have to wait until ... probably Chapter 22 now. (Sorry.) But lots of story to tell will mean lots of words, just ... sometimes I even surprise myself ;)**

**A hard winter here, two illnesses and minor injury, and (of course) my job have all contributed to the delay, but I soldier on. Many thanks to my friend and beta reader, Meneldur, who's proved very understanding despite a schedule busier even than mine. His input informed the first section this chapter, and he has already given valuable feedback on about half of the next chapter, which will hopefully help me get it to you sooner. (I certainly know I'M eager to finally get Azula out of the Spirit World.)**

**Also think I have a few reviews to answer... (Thank you all for the reviews!) We will learn more next chapter about Ursa and her actual relationship to Azula. My take on that is (I think) rather unique in fanfiction. I hope you'll enjoy seeing it unfold in sometimes surprising ways.**

**Confession time: Momo died last chapter in part because I was getting tired of having to remember when he would/wouldn't be with Aang and think what he'd be doing. Also to provide an emotional pivot point and subsequent development to Aang. (And if anyone's gonna get Fridged, I figure Momo is least likely to be missed here, so ... priorities.) At least we see Aang gave him a good send-off this chapter.**

**malfunctionjunction (you've changed your pen name like three times, but this is my favorite so far :) Thanks so much for the lengthy review. I appreciate that you made the time to write that at all, and it was a welcome surprise on a tedious Saturday morning. (I had to work.) Azula first appeared in the Northern Water Tribe because I thought the Spirit World would appear in the most alien, hostile form possible to her, given her feelings about it. It appeared as a swamp to Aang, I'm guessing, because he associates the Foggy Swamp with a spiritual place.**

**Very good observation on the difference in how Zuko and Azula viewed the child last chapter. I think a lot of that probably has to do with assumptions Zuko has toward Azula and their history. Whether it will persist, time will tell. Since you asked specifically about the Fire Nation royal family in Zuko's vision last chapter, thought I'd share a little about that: Zuko's corner of the Spirit World was shaped (much like Azula's) by his views and priorities. Before his conscious memories could catch up to what he was seeing (for instance, he didn't realize at this point that he was dead) Zuko began to see this idyllic childhood he missed was not so idyllic after all...**

**Zuko saw Ozai very deliberately turning Azula against him and Ursa, isolating Azula to establish this exclusive bond of "only love" which Ozai then exploited. (And with Ursa gone and Zuko out of reach, who was left to gainsay him?) It finally broke when Zuko saw (as he didn't then) Ozai's cruelest abuse, exploiting that isolation to corrupt Azula, to steal her innocence. Zuko finally tried to stop it, to help her. But what he didn't realize was that he's still in Ozai's grip, the shadow of their father hangs over him too, and he has the potential to do the same thing (or even worse) to Azula.**

**(This last was an exerpt from a lengthy explanation of the scene I provided to my beta reader who — despite knowing more than any other reader about the story — still desired clarification. In short, sorry I made both your heads hurt. But I enjoyed your literary analysis skills, and hope you enjoyed the section.)**

**Next chapter brings Azula, and a surprise spirit!cameo. Until then, best wishes. (And please leave a review!)**


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